Luginbuehl, T., & Schoebi, D.
Using intensive repeated measures designs to study family processes: Emotional inertia and interpersonal emotion perception in daily life
The current article illustrates how intensive repeated measures designs can be used to study family processes. Interpersonal processes are of key importance in family research, but rarely studied as such. In the present article, we provide an example of how intensive longitudinal data provides insight into family processes. The example we use focuses on how spouses’ emotional dynamics are associated with their perception of the partner’s daily emotions. Parents from 172 families rated their own and their partner’s emotional states six times a day during one week. Variables of interest were inferred from repeated measurements of momentary experience within individuals and dyads over time. Multilevel analyses revealed that mothers who featured less changeability in their emotions provided more accurate reports of their partners’ emotions. This example illustrates how over time processes within individuals and dyads can be accessed using intensive repeated measures designs and analyzed in a multilevel analytic framework.
Testing, Psychometrics, Methodology in Applied Psychology, 2015, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 219-234, DOI: 10.4473/TPM22.2.4
