93 The feasibility of daily monitoring 4 The diversity of topics that were chosen as personalized diary items demonstrates that there is considerable heterogeneity within the target group in terms of their everyday challenges. Between-person heterogeneity had previously been indicated by Nouwens et al. (2017), who identified five unique classes of people with a mild intellectual disability or borderline intellectual functioning in terms of their personal and environmental characteristics. However, even within classes, each individual has his/her own unique characteristics and experiences. In a fully standardized questionnaire, each individual will thus either encounter items that may be irrelevant for themself and/or miss items that would have had personal relevance (Haynes et al., 2009; Weisz et al., 2011; Wright & Zimmerman, 2019). On the other hand, constructing personalized items in collaboration with each participant has the disadvantage that it requires more effort and time than just constructing one set of standardized items. Moreover, it hampers between-person comparisons. Complementing standardized assessments with personalized assessments may be a strategy to ensure both the comparability between individuals as well as the personal relevance. Diary compliance, especially when integrated with clinical practice, may be maximized when the survey measures what is relevant for the individual. The primary advantage of daily diary sampling, however, is not only to determine how individuals differ from each other, but to map fluctuations in behavioral and emotional patterns within individuals. Empirical findings about those with a mild intellectual disability are almost exclusively based on between-person inferences. Between-person data for example shows that, on average, people with a mild intellectual disability or borderline intellectual functioning who have higher levels of negative thinking report more severe alcohol use (Poelen et al., 2017). With daily diaries one could study whether individuals are actually using alcohol on moments/days when they are having negative thoughts, which would yield important insights for intervention. After all, interventions primarily focus on when and why symptoms occur. In other words, EMA provides researchers with a valuable tool to examine behaviors and emotions as they unfold across different contexts over time (Shiffman et al., 2008). Studying such within-person processes and how within-person processes differ between individuals, has considerably advanced psychological science over the past two decades (Russell & Gajos, 2020). Now that daily diary sampling has demonstrated feasibility, young people with a mild intellectual disability will hopefully also benefit from this in the future.
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