Uncovering the Daily Experiences of People Living With Advanced Cancer Using an Experience Sampling Method Questionnaire: Development, Content Validation, and Optimization Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The experience sampling method (ESM), a self-report method that typically uses multiple assessments per day, can provide detailed knowledge of the daily experiences of people with cancer, potentially informing oncological care. The use of the ESM among people with advanced cancer is limited, and no validated ESM questionnaires have been developed specifically for oncology. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to develop, content validate, and optimize the digital Experience Sampling Method for People Living With Advanced Cancer (ESM-AC) questionnaire, covering multidimensional domains and contextual factors. METHODS: A 3-round mixed methods study was designed in accordance with the Consensus-Based Standards for the Selection of Health Measurement Instruments (COSMIN) and the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer guidelines. The study included semistructured interviews with 43 people with stage IV breast cancer or stage III to IV lung cancer and 8 health care professionals. Round 1 assessed the appropriateness, relative importance, relevance, and comprehensiveness of an initial set of ESM items that were developed based on the existing questionnaires. Round 2 tested the comprehensibility of ESM items. Round 3 tested the usability of the digital ESM-AC questionnaire using the m-Path app. Analyses included descriptive statistics and qualitative content analysis. RESULTS: Following the first round, we developed an initial core set of 68 items (to be used with all patients) and a supplementary set (optional; patients select items), both covering physical, psychological, social, spiritual-existential, and global well-being domains and concurrent contexts in which experiences occur. We categorized items to be assessed multiple times per day as momentary items (eg, "At this moment, I feel tired"), once a day in the morning as morning items (eg, "Last night, I slept well"), or once a day in the evening as evening items (eg, "Today, I felt hopeful"). We used participants' evaluations to optimize the questionnaire items, the digital app, and its onboarding manual. This resulted in the ESM-AC questionnaire, which comprised a digital core questionnaire containing 31 momentary items, 2 morning items, and 7 evening items and a supplementary set containing 39 items. Participants largely rated the digital questionnaire as "easy to use," with an average score of 4.5 (SD 0.5) on a scale from 1 ("completely disagree") to 5 ("completely agree"). CONCLUSIONS: We developed the ESM-AC questionnaire, a content-validated digital questionnaire for people with advanced breast or lung cancer. It showed good usability when administered on smartphone devices. Future research should evaluate the potential of this ESM tool to uncover daily experiences of people with advanced breast or lung cancer, explore its clinical utility, and extend its validation to other populations with advanced diseases.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".