JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Modern psychology has long recognized that understanding human behavior requires knowledge about a person’s current context (Allport, 1942), which is often examined through daily diary studies (for a historical overview, see Bolger et al., 2003).

Objective:

The National Study of Daily Experiences (NSDE) is the largest and longest running publicly accessible daily diary study in the United States that is publicly accessible (Almeida et al., in press). The purpose of this paper is to provide a guide for researchers interested in initiating similar naturalistic studies and to facilitate research using the existing NSDE data.

Methods:

The NSDE includes 3,200 adults (24 – 92 years), yielding over 42,000 days of information to capture how daily life changes with age, over time, and across different cohorts, and how these daily experiences predict later health and well-being. An intensive longitudinal data collection, including an 8-day daily diary collected via phone surveys, concurrent with salivary cortisol assessment has been completed across 30 years with 3 core waves and 2 refresher waves with data collection ongoing. Daily phone interviews consist of valid and reliable measures and daily psychometric properties including the Daily Inventory of Stressful Events (DISE), daily events, physical health indices, emotional experiences, cognitive health, and biomarkers.

Results:

Recruitment was launched in 1995, with data collection occurring every 9-10 years. The most recent data collection is ongoing through 2027. All NSDE data are housed under the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study umbrella, with archived and updated datasets made available to the public at https://midus.colectica.org/.

Conclusions:

Results from the NSDE have helped to refine understanding of daily stress processes due to the study’s timescale. It has provided data for hundreds of studies examining the daily lives of adults, with much more to learn from these data. Microlongitudinal measures and combinations of factors provide for new avenues of research and promise for better understanding of health and aging. Moreover, NSDE data can be combined with datasets from neuroscience, biomarker, and macrolongitudinal sub-projects from MIDUS to examine health-related processes. In addition to offering information on how to use the NSDE, the current protocol serves as a resource for secondary data analyses and an outline for investigators wishing to replicate an intensive assessment design to other populations and research questions to continue to refine our understanding of how daily stress processes influence health and well-being.