Award Date

5-1-2012

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Psychology

First Committee Member

Russell T. Hurlburt

Second Committee Member

Christopher Heavey

Third Committee Member

Murray Millar

Fourth Committee Member

Paul Jones

Number of Pages

81

Abstract

Modern experience sampling methods attempt to understand the phenomenology of inner experience through a variety of methods, including questionnaires, diaries, and verbalization of ongoing cognitive processes. The goal of such studies is to minimize potential roadblocks to accessing inner experience, such as retrospective recall, memory failures, and bias. The current project focuses on one such method, Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES). DES is an idiographic, exploratory, and ecologically valid method of studying inner experience. In this method, participants wear a beeper with an earphone that emits a random beep. When the beep sounds, the participant is to write down notes about whatever was in his or her experience at the last uninterrupted moment before the beep. Once six of these beeped moments are collected, the investigator conducts and expositional interview to gain a faithful account of the participant's inner experience at each moment of each beep. The interviewing process requires from the investigator a great deal of skill in helping the participant to accurately report his or her experience. The current project continues the development of a DES interview training tool, presented in a multi-media format to teach interested persons how to do the DES method. The current project created a training module on how to recognize subjunctification in participants, which is an important indicator that the participant is not talking about direct experience. The current project also created a multi-media presentation of full DES interviews with commentary from the interviewers that allows the student to understand the process of the interviewer in a real sampling interview.

Keywords

Descriptive Experience Sampling; Inner experience; Introspection; Interview; Interviewing in mental health; Multi-media professor; Psychological research personnel – Training of; Psychology – Methodology; Subjunctification; Training

Disciplines

Clinical Psychology | Psychiatry and Psychology

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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