Research Interests

Russ Hurlburt explores inner experience — thoughts, feelings, sensations, and so on. He is the originator of the Descriptive Experience Sampling method, which uses random beepers and intensive interviews to provide qualitative, idiographic descriptions of inner experience. In the 1970s, he was the first to use beepers in psychological research and was the creator of the "thought sampling" method. Dr. Hurlburt considers the understanding of inner experience to be a fundamental task of psychology, and has written six books and many articles exploring how best to investigate experience. He has explored the experience of a variety of people: adults and adolescents both with and without diagnoses such as bulimia, anxiety, schizophrenia, borderline personality, and Asperger's syndrome. He is open to exploring any individual, group, method, or activity that may expand our understanding of inner experience.

Dr. Hurlburt is also the author of a statistics textbook that presents the "eyeball estimation" techniques that he has developed for visualizing statistical processes.

Dr. Hurlburt's 1976 doctoral degree is in clinical psychology from the University of South Dakota.