Background: Little is known about the factors that bias event-based (i.e., self-initiated) reporting of health behaviors in ecological momentary assessment (EMA) due to the difficulty inherent to tracking failures to self-initiate reports.
Purpose: To introduce a real-time method for identifying the predictors of noncompliance with event-based reporting.
Methods: N = 410 adults who used both cigarettes and e-cigarettes completed a 1-week EMA protocol that combined random reporting of current contexts with event-based reporting of tobacco use. Each random assessment first asked if participants were currently using tobacco and, if so, the assessment converted into a "randomly captured" event report-indicating failure to self-initiate that report. Multilevel modeling tested predictors of failing to complete random reports and failing to self-initiate event reports.
Results: On the person level, male sex, higher average cigarette rate, and higher average cigarette urge each predicted missing random reports. The person-level predictors of failing to self-initiate event reports were older age, higher average cigarette and e-cigarette rates, higher average cigarette urge, and being alone more on average; the moment-level predictors were lower cigarette urge, lower positive affect, alcohol use, and cannabis use. Strikingly, the randomly captured events comprised more of the total EMA reports (28%) than did the self-initiated event reports (24%). These report types were similar across most variables, with some exceptions, such as momentary cannabis use predicting the random capture of tobacco events.
Conclusions: This study demonstrated a method of identifying predictors of noncompliance with event-based reporting of tobacco use and enhancing the real-time capture of events.
Keywords: Compliance; Ecological momentary assessment (EMA); Event-based reporting; Missingness; Tobacco.
This study introduced a real-time method for identifying person- and moment-level predictors of failing to self-initiate tobacco event reports during ecological momentary assessment (EMA), and for capturing a large number of events that would have likely otherwise been missed. The method has implications for behavioral health research more broadly.
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