Experience-sampling and event-sampling research

In recent years, an emerging focus on studying within-person processes and phenomena has started to complement traditional between-person research streams that explain how and why construct scores co-vary among individuals (Ilies, Schwind, & Heller, 2007; Ilies et al., 2010). This emerging focus has been aided by the introduction of frameworks that include an episodic conceptualization of work events and occurrences in order to explain variations in affective states, attitudes, and behaviors within people and across time (see Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996; Beal et al., 2005). That is, this within-person focus aims to examine the effects of workplace episodes, dynamically experienced states, and temporally fluctuating factors in order to investigate phenomena and research questions that cannot be adequately addressed with between-individual approaches (Alliger & Williams, 1993; Sheldon et al., 1996). Specifically, between-person designs consider variations in construct scores across time as transient error, as they can only investigate the “trait-like” or stable component of the variables being examined.