How to assess social regulation of stress and emotions in daily family life? A computer-assisted family self-monitoring system (FASEM-C)

A major problem for scientific and practical work in many branches of psych ology is the reliable access to phenomena under study. Traditional assessme nt procedures are often reliant on retrospective recall, self report measur es and/or laboratory simulations. All these have their strengths and weakne sses. Ideally observations of people's behaviour and interactions, and the monitoring of thoughts and feelings, should be of real events as they occur . This paper focuses on some methodological and reliability issues associat ed with development in handheld computer self-recording systems and describ es a new computer-assisted self-monitoring system for emotional processes i n families with adolescents. The method is based on simultaneous self-obser vations of family members older than 13 years. The paper describes the proc edures involved in using this approach and demonstrates how to obtain indic ators for reactivity, reliability and some aspects of validity. Copyright ( C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.