The experience sampling method (ESM) is an innovative research method to study the immediate real
emotional experience experienced in real life through the immediate reaction of research participants. ESM,
which has received significant attention in recent, is considered as the research method particularly for child
care teachers’ emotions and happiness. This method has been shown to be able to overcome the limitations
in current research methods, based on teachers’ recall or surveys, in assessing child care teachers’ emotional
states or stress levels. Despite the expectation that the need for further research on the increased stress and
negative emotional experiences of child care teachers and its appropriateness as the alternative research
method to study child care teachers’ immediate emotional experience, ESM has deficiencies in that research
participants need to have their pencil-and-paper survey packages on hand whenever their electronic beepers
randomly beep. Furthermore, ESM demands much more researcher energy and efforts to handle the
voluminous data collected from each participant in effectively creating a database. In this paper, in order to
apply ESM successfully to the study of child care teachers’ emotional experience, we aim to develop a
software program that uses mobile communication technology. Given that traditional types of data collection
methods in social science research can prove too burdensome to encourage participation in surveys in the
first place or ensure the return of completed surveys, the present study adopts a convergent research
approach to develop a software program that is able to obtain ESM participants’ answers immediately on
their personal smart phones. This study deals with system construction and prototyping for software
development as a basic research and evaluates the research results through indepth interview with experts.