The Personality, Motivation, and Cognition (PMC) Diary (Version 2.0)
For further info, contact Eshkol Rafaeli at erm5@nyu.edu
Purpose:
The PMC Diary (Version 2.0) is a Palm-OS questionnaire program designed to collect repeated responses in daily or within-day diary studies. The program is appropriate for both time-based and event-based studies. Researchers interested in this program may also wish to consider alternative available programs such as ESP for the Palm environment (see http://www2.bc.edu/~barretli/esp/) or ISIS for the Pocket-PC environment (for information, contact raffety@ccplex.com).
Requirements:
The program operates on the Palm-OS platform, and requires access to a desktop PC for the installation, management, and retrieval of data. The program does not require much memory space on the palm-top, and allows for hundreds of diary entries to be saved and retrieved.
Capabilities:
- Questions: PMC Diary allows researchers to include a variable number of questions. Each question is presented on a separate screen. A response advances the program to the next screen, but participants can retrace their steps (using a "Back" button).
- Signals: PMC Diary can be programmed to signal (beep) the participant at fixed intervals.
- Time-flexibility: Participants have some flexibility in the use of the program.
- a) Snooze: When signalled for a reponse, participants can request a delay ("Snooze") ranging in time from 5 minutes to 90 minutes (with a default of 15 minutes).
- b) Sleep: When participants complete the final entry of the day, they can instruct the program to shut off until a certain time the next day, at which point the program returns to its signalling schedule.
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* Compliance checks: Time and Date stamps for the beginning and end of each diary entry are included in the saved data.
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* Time-limits: to ensure that each diary entry is completed in one seating, the program times-out after a set length of time (but retains those responses that were entered).
* Blocked access: to limit the risk of participant access to data, and to increase battery life,PMC Diary "takes over" the Palm device and blocks access to all other programs on the device.
* Data handling: Data are saved as a comma-delimited text file, which can be immediately imported into Excel or other desk-top programs.
Limitations:
- * PMC Diary currently uses a uniform response format (a 0-9 scale) for all question screens. In our own research, we have found this response format flexible enough to serve both rating-scale questions and discrete-answer questions; nonetheless, we hope to remove this limitation from future versions.
- * At present, questions cannot be randomized.
- * Also at present, the documentation of the program is limited. It is not an off-the-shelf product, and usage of it requires some training.
Availability and cost:
Researchers interested in using the PMC Diary should contact Eshkol Rafaeli, who is now in the Social/Personality Program, Psychology Dept., New York University. (email: erm5@nyu.edu).
Last revised May 14, 2002
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