The methodological handbook that codified the experience-sampling-method as a research protocol, co-authored by Joel M. Hektner, Jennifer A. Schmidt, and csikszentmihalyi and published by SAGE in 2006. This is the technical reference for researchers wanting to understand, implement, or evaluate ESM-based studies of flow and everyday psychological experience.
What the book covers
The volume provides a complete treatment of ESM methodology: theoretical justification for ecological momentary assessment over retrospective measures, sampling schedule design (how many signals per day, interval distribution, optimal study length), instrument construction for the self-report forms, participant compliance strategies, data management for the resulting nested time-series datasets, and statistical analysis methods including multilevel modeling appropriate for ESM data structure.
It also presents a substantial empirical section summarizing findings from three decades of ESM research on flow in daily life — drawing on studies from the adolescent research (being-adolescent), the optimal experience research (optimal-experience-edited-volume), and subsequent work by researchers in the Csikszentmihalyi tradition. This makes the book simultaneously a methods guide and an empirical synthesis.
Significance for the flow research tradition
The handbook matters to the KB because it is the authoritative documentation of what experience-sampling-method evidence for flow actually shows. The claims in popular flow literature — about how often people experience flow, under what conditions, with what consequences — trace back to ESM studies. Understanding what ESM can and cannot establish is necessary for evaluating those claims.
Specifically, the book clarifies: what ESM studies measure (momentary self-reports of affect, concentration, challenge, skill, and activity) versus what they do not directly measure (physiological states, neurochemistry, long-term outcomes); the sampling constraints that bound generalizability; the difference between flow-like states (simultaneous high challenge and high skill, captured by ESM) and the full nine-dimensional flow state that interview and retrospective methods capture; and the distinction between group-level patterns and individual variability.
The methodological transparency the handbook provides is the reference standard against which popular treatments of ESM evidence should be checked. When flow-psychology-of-optimal-experience states that people experience flow in X% of their waking hours, or that work produces more flow than leisure, these claims come from the ESM studies this handbook documents. The handbook allows readers to assess those claims against their methodological basis.
Reception
The book became the standard methodological reference for ESM research across psychology, not just flow studies. ESM has been adopted in clinical psychology (tracking mood disorders), health psychology (studying pain and fatigue), social psychology (examining relationship quality), and organizational psychology (studying work engagement). The Csikszentmihalyi program's ESM work, documented in this handbook, helped legitimate ecological momentary assessment as a mainstream research methodology — a contribution to psychological methodology that outlasts any particular substantive finding about flow.