Capturing the temporal dynamics of personality in daily life: The Personality and Contextualized Experiences (PACE) Study

Thoughts, feelings, and behaviors constantly change in everyday life, and dynamic personality theories emphasize the role of these short-term changes for understanding how momentary states give rise to more enduring personality patterns. Although the growing use of the experience sampling method (ESM) has made it more feasible to examine such dynamics in situ, methodological challenges limit the inferences that can be drawn about temporal personality dynamics. This paper describes the rationale, procedure, and first half of the dataset of the Personality and Contextualized Experiences (PACE) Study, a large, multi- site ESM study which currently comprises 1,126 undergraduates (76,823 observations) across Canada, Germany, and the United States. Of these, 421 participants completed the entire study (baseline survey, ≥ 100 ESM surveys, and follow-up survey). The study advances what can be learned from ESM data by combining (a) a relatively large sample featuring a relatively high number of observations per person with (b) experimental comparisons of two sampling designs, (c) retrospective assessment of missed states, and (d) a personalized assessment of situational information. The PACE Study further includes a newly developed global self-report questionnaire intended to capture aspects of individuals’ dynamic patterns of states without requiring ESM data. Overall, the PACE Study enables modeling temporal dynamics in a nuanced manner, relating these dynamics to a range of variables, and comparing different types of self-reports for capturing dynamic patterns of states.