Building Ecological Momentary Assessment

Project website: https://wangda.pythonanywhere.com/

Occupant survey is an essential method in post-occupancy evaluation (POE) to understand occupants’ satisfaction and attitudes toward built environments and the relationship between occupants’ experience and environmental features. However, this method has issues of recall bias, lacked contextual information, lacked continued feedback, etc. Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) repeatedly collects the subject’s experience in real-time, to minimize recall bias and maximize ecological validity. This study aims to evaluate the feasibility and usability of applying EMA to building occupant environmental satisfaction surveys via a web application that was designed and developed by the authors. A pilot study invited eight students who were studying in a designated academic building to use this application to submit two questionnaires continuously for five days to evaluate the environments in real-time, when they received recurring email notifications. After analyzing their responses, four participants and four potential stakeholders in facility management and workplace strategy were interviewed about their opinions on the feasibility and usability of applying EMA to occupant survey via this application. This study introduced building-EMA - an open-source framework to apply EMA to POE, demonstrated its values in building and facility management, lessons learned, and directions for future studies.