Most mental health challenges first appear in youth between the ages of 16 and 25, right when many young people are starting post-secondary education. This stage of life brings many changes; students are exploring their identity, building new relationships, pursuing independence, managing finances, meeting academic demands, and adjusting to post-secondary life. Experiences tied to students’ identity, such as discrimination or harassment, can make these challenges even harder.
Supporting students through this transition is critical. But much of the current research that shapes how we understand and support students is based on traditional tools that do not always capture the full picture.
Limitations of Traditional Surveys
Many studies on student mental health rely on retrospective surveys that ask students to reflect on past experiences. For example, a study on stress might ask students, “How many stressors did you experience last month? Which ones, and how did they make you feel?”
Although these questions are important, they depend on memory, which can be unreliable. It can be difficult to accurately recall what happened or the exact emotions felt days or weeks earlier. As a result, important details can be missed, introducing gaps and potential biases into research findings (Talari & Goyal, 2020).
A New Approach: Leveraging Technology Through Experience Sampling
Experience sampling is a research method that captures individual experiences in real time. Instead of asking students retrospectively, it prompts them to answer questions once or multiple times per day, over one to two weeks, as they go about their daily routines (Larson & Csikszentmihalyi, 2014). Students might be asked short questions like, “What stressors have you experienced today?” to track what’s happening around them more objectively, as well as questions like, “How are you feeling right now?” to understand their mood in that specific moment.
This approach has become far more feasible and scalable through advancements in digital technology. Mobile apps and online survey platforms allow prompts to be delivered directly to students’ phones or computers, making it easier to respond in real time and within natural daily contexts.
By leveraging technology to capture experiences as they occur, experience sampling reduces recall bias, reveals how moods and experiences fluctuate throughout the day, and links emotions to students’ context, such as where students are, what they are doing, or who they are with. This creates a more detailed and dynamic picture of student well-being that better reflects their day-to-day lives.
Experience Sampling at the University of Toronto
Researchers at the University of Toronto are increasingly using experience sampling to better understand student mental health.
At the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), Dr. Chloe Hamza and a graduate student from the CARE Lab, who is one of this post’s authors (Sarah Kuburi), study how factors such as stress, sleep, and stigma shape self-injury on a day-to-day basis. Recent findings from the research team show that on days when students faced more stressors, such as relationship problems, difficulties balancing responsibilities, and receiving low grades, students were more likely to engage in self-injury on that same day (Kuburi et al., 2026). These findings highlight how even a single day’s experiences can meaningfully impact student well-being, underscoring the importance of timely, accessible support.
At the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education, Dr. Catherine Sabiston and another author of this post (Avery Hinchcliffe) use experience sampling to study how emotions, body image, and mental health shape disordered eating and exercise behaviours in daily life. The research team found that on days when students experience stronger negative emotions about their bodies and have a harder time coping with those feelings, they are more likely to engage in disordered eating behaviours (Hinchcliffe et al., 2026). These findings point to new opportunities for preventing and treating disordered eating by supporting more effective coping with body-related emotions in the moment.
A Call to Expand Experience Sampling in Student Mental Health Research
Although experience sampling in student mental health is becoming more common in fields such as education, kinesiology, and physical education, it is clear that student mental health benefits from an intersectional and interdisciplinary lens. By raising awareness of this method, the authors hope to encourage more departments across the university to leverage current technological advancements and adopt experience sampling methods in their research. In doing so, post-secondary campuses can more fully understand students’ experiences and help create more responsive and supportive environments that strengthen student mental health informed by day-to-day experiences.
Supporting Student Mental Health Research at the University of Toronto
Both authors of this commentary were recently recognized through the Inlight Student Mental Health Research Fellowship (https://smhr.utoronto.ca/) for their graduate research using experience sampling. Inlight’s vision is to enhance student mental health and wellness for all students through research, innovation, and application, in collaboration with post-secondary students, institutions, and community partners. The Fellowship supports graduate students in developing skills to conduct research that directly addresses post-secondary student mental health.
A key principle of Inlight is to involve students as active partners in research. This is especially important for methods like experience sampling, where using digital devices and apps to complete multiple surveys each day about personal experiences can feel demanding and overwhelming, particularly for students already navigating many responsibilities and priorities during this stage of life.
That is why student voices must be part of every step. Students can help decide which platforms and applications are most intuitive, which devices are preferred, and which questions matter most when space is limited, ensuring the focus reflects their lived experiences. They can also advise on how surveys are worded, how often they are sent, and how they fit into daily life, making participation less burdensome. When students co-design studies, the surveys become more meaningful and reliable, leading to higher completion and retention rates. Student involvement also strengthens the impact of the research by ensuring outcomes are actionable and directly inform improvements in student well-being. Additionally, when students from diverse backgrounds are involved, findings better reflect the richness of student life and become more meaningful and broadly applicable.
Engaging students from marginalized and underserved communities is especially important in experience sampling research. Recent work by former Inlight Research Fellow and current CARE Lab member Rya Buckley illustrates this clearly. Through her research with students from these communities, Rya found that racialized university students often encounter unique barriers when accessing mental health support that are tied to their identities, such as overt microaggressions, ableism, and other forms of bias (Buckley et al., 2025). These daily experiences can significantly shape emotional well-being, yet they are difficult to capture through traditional retrospective surveys.
Experience sampling provides a powerful way to document these moment-to-moment experiences and their real-time impact. Through technological advancements, using this method has never been easier. By actively involving students in study design, particularly those from marginalized and underserved communities, researchers can ensure that surveys capture the experiences most relevant and unique to them and deepen understanding of how identity-based stressors shape mental health.
Student mental health is lived one day at a time. By leveraging technology to measure it in real time and involving students directly in the process, researchers can more fully and accurately capture the unique experiences of student populations in order to better support them.
References
Hinchcliffe, A. J., Arbour-Nicitopoulos, K. P., Pila, E., Uliaszek, A. A., & Sabiston, C. M. (2026). Integrating positive emotions and maladaptive exercise into eating disorder theory: Body-related self-conscious emotions and perfectionism in post-secondary students [Manuscript in preparation]. Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education, University of Toronto.
Kuburi, S., Hamza, C. A., Goldstein, A. L., & Heath, N. L. (2026). Daily stressors and nonsuicidal self-injury urges and behaviors in post-secondary students. Emerging Adulthood, 14(1), 140–153. https://doi.org/10.1177/21676968251395353
Larson, R., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014). The experience sampling method. In M. Csikszentmihalyi (Ed.), Flow and the foundations of positive psychology: The collected works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pp. 21–34). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9088-8_2
Talari, K., & Goyal, M. (2020). Retrospective studies – Utility and caveats. Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 50(4), 398–402. https://doi.org/10.4997/jrcpe.2020.409
Edited by: Nitha Vincent