Original title: Effects of Questionnaire Notifications on Engagement and Attrition in an Ecological Momentary Assessment Study: Longitudinal Observational Study
Daniel Dvořák, Martin Kreidl, Martin Tancoš · September 2026
Health studies often ask people to fill out quick phone surveys throughout the day. Researchers call this ecological momentary assessment, or EMA. A big challenge is getting people to answer without annoying them into quitting. Researchers tracked 201 teenagers over a year to see how notification reminders affect survey completion and dropout rates. They looked at whether sending repeated reminders for an unopened survey helped or caused people to stop participating. Most teenagers answered right away after the first prompt. If they did not, later reminders actually increased the chance that they would finally open the survey. Surprisingly, getting more reminders did not cause reminder fatigue or make teens drop out of the study. Instead, participants who received more reminders had slightly lower dropout rates. However, reminders worked worse if teenagers were already actively using their phones, especially on social media or messaging apps.
Imagine you are trying to get a teenager to come downstairs for dinner. You call once. Nothing. You call again a few minutes later. Still nothing. You worry that calling more will just annoy them and make them refuse to eat at all. But this study found that each extra call actually made it a little more likely they would eventually come down, and it did not make them skip dinner the next night. The only time calling backfired was when they were already on their phone—then they were less likely to respond. In this paper, the notifications are the calls, the dinner is the survey, and the phone being in use is what makes the calls less effective.
Smartphone studies that ping people repeatedly risk annoying them into quitting. This paper tracked 201 teenagers for a year and found the opposite: more reminders actually made them slightly less likely to drop out. For researchers running health apps or surveys on phones, this means the fear of notification fatigue may be misplaced, at least for adolescents. The real lever for keeping people engaged is not how many pings you send, but whether you send them when the phone is already in use.
The abstract does not establish causality—it reports associations from an observational study. The sample is limited to Czech adolescents aged 13–17, so results may not generalize to other age groups or cultures. The study examined only one EMA design (four 14-day bursts, up to 10 notifications per window) and did not test alternative scheduling strategies. The analysis of phone context relied on momentary screen activity data, which may not capture all relevant factors.
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Effects of Questionnaire Notifications on Engagement and Attrition in an Ecological Momentary Assessment Study: Longitudinal Observational Study — Daniel Dvořák, Martin Kreidl, Martin Tancoš — SocArXiv — doi:10.31235/osf.io/2katd_v2
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.