Preparing your data for deposit in the EMOTE database

Thank you for contributing your intensive longitudinal dataset to EMOTE! We appreciate your dedication to open science principles by making your data available to others.

This page outlines how to begin the data deposit process. If you have any questions throughout this process, please get in touch with our team at emote-database@unimelb.edu.au

Before you begin the data deposit process, please make sure your data meets the following requirements:

Collected by humans

Your data were collected from humans using intensive longitudinal methods (e.g. experience sampling, ecological momentary assessment, diary methods, ambulatory assessment). These methods are characterized by multiple measurements collected from the same participant during their everyday lives. Note, we refer to this kind of data as ESM data in this guide.

Collected ethically

Your data has ethics approval from an ethics committee, and your ethics clearance allows you to share de-identified data with other researchers.

De-identified

To ensure the anonymitiy of your participants, any identifying information must be removed from the data.

Please follow these four steps to make sure you have removed all identifying information about participants:

  1. Remove any specific identifying information(more info)
  2. Omit any demographic information that is very specific (e.g., a specific job title) and enduring (is stable across time), or recode these variables to make them more abstract (more info)
  3. Review any open-text of strong variables to ensure that participants have not accidentally included identifying information in these fields (more info). Remove any potentially identifying responses or variables or recode these variables into more abstract categories.
  4. Review whether someone could slice across all the demographic variables available to identify a participant (more info). Remove any variables that are part of potential concern, or specific answers that might identify participants.

How should I format my data for upload?

Please follow these instructions to ensure your dataset can be uploaded quickly and is easily searchable by other users:

  1. Create or relabel a de-identified participant ID as 'UUID'. Move this variable to first column in your dataset
  2. Add a 'Date_Local' and a 'Time_Local' variable, reflecting the date and time each ESM survey was scheduled in the participant's local time zone. Use NA for expired surveys.
    1. Date_Local formatted as YYYY-MM-DD
    2. Time_Local formatted as HH:MM:SS (or HH:MM), using 24-hour time
    See here for a guide on how to transform common date and time variables into these formats in excel and R Studio.
  3. Include only raw data from your study. This ensures that any potential mistakes made in the transformation process aren’t perpetuated across data-users and allows researchers using the data to create and check scales from first-principles. If you aren’t sure which variables to leave in or take out, see here for a guide.
  4. Omit all data exclusions for withdrawals, technical issues, and careless responding. This information will be captured in the data upload form.
  5. Missing values may be left blank or empty, or replaced by NA or NaN. If you have used a different missing value flag (e.g., -999) please replace these with empty cells or NA.
  6. Please translate any information provided to EMOTE into English (or omit information that cannot be translated).
  7. Format the data as a single CSV data file encoded in UTF-8 format (see here for a guide), in long format wherein each row represents a single measurement occasion (e.g., an ESM timepoint). If time-invariant data were collected for each participant (e.g., at baseline or follow up) in addition to intensive longitudinal data, these data should be repeated for each row belonging to a give participant.
Example data including ESM measures, Baseline and Follow-up data. Note, Baseline and Follow-up measures (in blue) were only collected once and are therefore repeated for each row of ESM data (in green).
UUID Date_Local Time_Local ESM_1 ESM_2 Baseline_1 Followup_1
001 2018-06-05 09:05:13 5 4 50 40
001 2018-06-05 10:15:13 4 4 50 40
001 2018-06-05 13:19:13 4 3 50 40

If you have any issues, please contact the EMOTE team at emote-database@unimelb.edu.au, we are happy to help.