 39. Ecological Sampling Methods  815
Observational Assessment  
of Objective Situation  Cues
The growing number of methods that have 
recently become available for the observa -
tional assessment of daily behavior, which 
we have reviewed in detail, also allow for 
capturing situation cues or objective aspects 
of the daily physical and social environment. 
For example, Holtzman et al. (2010) used 
the EAR method to study narcissism in daily 
life. Consistent with the idea that narcissists 
gravitate toward situations that afford self- 
presentation, narcissistic participants spent 
more time in group settings and in informal 
social settings that afforded socializing rela -
tive to their less narcissistic peers. Tobin et 
al. (2015) examined how real-world conflict 
situations relate to the experience of asthma 
symptoms. Objectively assessed conflict 
situations, coded from the EAR recordings, 
predicted adolescents’ asthma symptoms 
even when their subjective conflict reports 
were statistically controlled.
In a similar way, mobile sensing methods 
allow for the unobtrusive assessment of ob -
jective aspects of situations. For example, 
mobile sensing data offer insights into rela -
tions among locations, mobility, and smart -
phone usage (Mehrotra et al., 2017). Recog -
nizing the limited scientific value of raw GPS 
coordinates, Do and Gatica-  Perez (2014) 
developed a way to convert geographic lo -
cation information into semantic location 
information by combining automatic place 
recognition, with participants manually 
labeling frequently visited places. This al -
lowed the researchers to conduct a place-use 
analysis at the level of psychologically mean -
ingful locations (e.g., home, work, a friend’s 
home). An interesting finding was that high -
ly mobile individuals, in terms of the num -
ber of places they visit per day, also spent 
more time at friends’ places, which provides 
objective, real-world situational support for 
the known association between activity and 
sociability (Soto & John, 2017). Finally, 
most smartphones come “out of the box” 
with temperature, barometer, and luminos -
ity sensors that can further characterize a 
person’s momentary physical environment. 
For example, temperature and luminosity 
sensors might jointly allow distinguishing 
indoor from outdoor environments, and barometer information could allow for a 
real-world and real-time test of the idea that 
introverts indeed gravitate toward hills and 
mountains (Oishi, Talhelm, & Lee, 2015).
Arguably, though, the most important 
source of information for the objective as -
sessment of situations is visual cues. With 
progress in the development of miniature 
cameras, solutions for visual event sam -
pling, or “life logging,” have become readily 
available and have already been employed in 
numerous studies. A driver in this field was 
Microsoft Research’s SenseCam, a wear -
able camera that is worn around the neck 
and that, every 30 seconds, takes a picture 
of the momentary environment a person is 
facing. Initially designed to study memory 
processes, SenseCam has since been applied 
to a range of topics, including the study of 
human activity classification, dietary analy -
sis, and sedentary behavior (Doherty et al., 
2013). Unobtrusive image capture with a 
device such as SenseCam faces important 
ethical challenges around participant pri -
vacy and third-party consent. Many of these 
challenges overlap with those in unobtru -
sive ambient sound recording, but some are 
unique to or accentuated with image capture 
(e.g., identifiability of bystanders; Kelly et 
al., 2013; Robbins, 2017). After Microsoft 
Research stopped developing SenseCam, it 
was briefly marketed as Vicon Revue Cam -
era, but ultimately was taken off the market 
in 2013.
Around the time the SenseCam became 
unavailable, a new, technologically en -
hanced life-  logging camera was launched. 
The Narrative Clip is a tiny, lightweight, 
high-  quality, WiFi-, Bluetooth-, and GPS- 
enabled wearable camera that takes periodic 
(every 30 seconds), geo-  tagged pictures. It 
operates when upright and clipped to cloth -
ing and goes into standby when put down on 
a flat surface. It synchronizes the recorded 
pictures with a mobile device and works in 
tandem with an app for efficient storing, 
sorting, and searching of the images. Brown, 
Blake, and Sherman (2017) introduced the 
Narrative Clip as a research tool for social 
and personality psychologists. In a large 
study on subjective and objective aspects 
of situations, participants completed both 
personality and situation measures, and 
wore the Narrative Clip for an entire day. 