Help Me study! Music Listening Habits While Studying (Dataset)

This repository contains the raw data used for a research study that examined university students' music listening habits while studying. There are two experiments in this research study. Experiment 1 is a retrospective survey, and Experiment 2 is a mobile experience sampling research study.

This repository contains five Microsoft Excel files with data obtained from both experiments. The files are as follows:

• onlineSurvey_raw_data.xlsx
• esm_raw_data.xlsx
• esm_music_features_analysis.xlsx
• esm_demographics.xlsx
• index.xlsx

Files Description

File: onlineSurvey_raw_data.xlsx

This file contains the raw data from Experiment 1, including the (anonymised) demographic information of the sample. The sample characteristics recorded are:

• studentship
• area of study
• country of study
• type of accommodation a participant was living in
• age
• self-identified gender
• language ability (mono- or bi-/multilingual)
• (various) personality traits
• (various) musicianship
• (various) everyday music uses
• (various) music capacity

The file also contains raw data of responses to the questions about participants' music listening habits while studying in real life. These pieces of data are:

• likelihood of listening to specific (rated across 23) music genres while studying and during everyday listening.
• likelihood of listening to music with specific acoustic features (e.g., with/without lyrics, loud/soft, fast/slow) music genres while studying and during everyday listening.
• general likelihood of listening to music while studying in real life.
• (verbatim) responses to participants' written responses to the open-ended questions about their real-life music listening habits while studying.

File: esm_raw_data.xlsx

This file contains the raw data from Experiment 2, including the following variables:

• information of the music tracks (track name, artist name, and if available, Spotify ID of those tracks) each participant was listening to during each music episode (both while studying and during everyday-listening)
• level of arousal at the onset of music playing and the end of the 30-minute study period
• level of valence at the onset of music playing and the end of the 30-minute study period
• specific mood at the onset of music playing and the end of the 30-minute study period
• whether participants were studying
• their location at that moment
• (if studying) whether they were studying alone
• (if studying) the types of study tasks
• (if studying) the perceived level of difficulty of the study task
• whether participants were planning to listen to music while studying
• (various) reasons for music listening
• (various) perceived positive and negative impacts of studying with music

Each row represents the data for a single participant. Rows with a record of a participant ID but no associated data indicate that the participant did not respond to the questionnaire (i.e., missing data).

File: esm_music_features_analysis.xlsx

This file presents the music features of each recorded music track during both the study-episodes and the everyday-episodes (retrieved from Spotify's "Get Track's Audio Features" API). These features are:

• energy level
• loudness
• valence
• tempo
• mode

The contextual details of the moments each track was being played are also presented here, which include:

• whether the participant was studying
• their location (e.g., at home, cafe, university)
• whether they were studying alone
• the type of study tasks they were engaging with (e.g., reading, writing)
• the perceived difficulty level of the task

File: esm_demographics.xlsx

This file contains the demographics of the sample in Experiment 2 (N = 10), which are the same as in Experiment 1 (see above).

Each row represents the data for a single participant. Rows with a record of a participant ID but no associated demographic data indicate that the participant did not respond to the questionnaire (i.e., missing data). 

File: index.xlsx

Finally, this file contains all the abbreviations used in each document as well as their explanations.