Diary Method

Research Methods

Ruth Bartlett, Christine Milligan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350187177
• eBook ISBN: 9781350187191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published Open Access under a Creative Commons license as What is Diary Method?, this title is now also available as part of the Bloomsbury Research Methods series. This book provides an up-to-date, concise, and engaging introduction to solicited diary method, aimed at researchers and students who want to employ this methodology in their projects. Its primary focus is on the use of solicited diary method in the context of social and health-related research, but it also offers useful guidance on the everyday practice of diary-keeping. The authors draw on published research that makes use of this method, including their own independent studies involving older adults and family carers. The book opens with an overview of the development of diary techniques and a discussion of the value of the method, and provides an overview of the different ways of collecting and using diary data and techniques for analysing it. Key ethical issues are sensitively discussed. The book engages with new and novel developments in solicited diary method by engaging with the use of technology including discussion of how digital devices, email exchanges, social media such as Facebook, weblogs and micro-blogging such as Twitter, have the potential to change the meaning and nature of diary-keeping. The book includes a variety of visuals to enhance understanding, including a tabulated summary of the main strengths and limitations of using diary method, and strategies for mitigating limitations.

1 The development of diary techniques for research

Introduction

Everyone understands the idea of a diary. We have all kept a diary for various reasons and in various ways. For some people it may simply be used as a reminder for appointments or events, detailing where they need to be and what they need to be doing at different times; others may keep a more detailed diary or personal account of what they are doing and perhaps what they were thinking and feeling at the time. Individuals often develop personal preferences, routines and systems for keeping a personal diary and choose to keep what they record private. Others may choose, or be invited, to publish their diary; think, for example, of the British journalist and political aide Alastair Campbell who has published three volumes of diaries about his time serving alongside the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair. For many people, there is something inherently absorbing about writing and/or reading someone else’s personal diary.

In this book, we review and discuss how diary method has been used by researchers in the social and health sciences and suggest that technologies and modern forms of communication are transforming this method of data collection. Diary method has arguably been the ‘poor relation’ of the methodological family in qualitative research, compared, for example, to interviews. As Atkinson and Silverman (1997) pointed out some time ago, we live in an ‘interview society’ where the only route to ‘truth’ is thought to be through a face-to-face interview. One only has to consider the amount of research textbooks on qualitative interviewing, compared with what has been until now a single text on diary method (Alaszewski, 2006a). Or, the fact that several well-regarded and popular texts on mixed methods and qualitative research make very little, if any, reference to diary method (see, e.g., Bowling, 2014; Creswell, 2014; Flick, 2014). Yet, even a cursory search of the research literature published since 1990 reveals over 4,800 papers using diary method. Moreover, the method continues to provide researchers with a flexible tool for collecting rich data, especially in light of digital, web and social networking technologies. In this book, we therefore aim to clarify the role of diary method in the researchers’ toolkit and illustrate through empirical examples the value and limitations of this method for eliciting information and engaging participants in research. In particular, we consider a range of structured, semi-structured and unstructured approaches to diary method; some of the practical issues in designing diary research; and how this method can be modified and used to enable participants to take part in a study and have control over the process of data collection.

A distinctive feature of this book is the consideration given to how and why the diary method is used and might be modified for children and for adults who are frail or physically, cognitively or intellectually impaired in some way. Rather than assuming capacity (like standard research texts) we will discuss the strengths (and limitations) of utilizing diary method to collect data from people who may experience problems in remembering, writing, talking, thinking clearly and using diary-keeping equipment, such as electronic diaries and cameras. We discuss the importance and implications of modifying the diary method in the context of emerging inclusive research methodologies and outline the ways in which researchers have adapted the method to enable the participation of different groups in research.

Another distinctive feature of this book is the consideration given to technologies and modern forms of communication. As other researchers in this series have noted, probably the most significant development in research methods in the past decade is the advancement of digital technologies (Wiles, 2012). Digital devices, weblogging and social media sites like Facebook facilitate and encourage people to maintain and share a personal record of their everyday lives, and the information is stored in a chronological order, as it is in a diary. The question as to whether this constitutes a form of diary keeping that researchers can use is often asked by students and will be discussed in Chapter 4. In this sense, the book fits well with the ‘What is?’ series, as we consider the value of diary method not only from a historical and present-day perspective, but also its future potential in the hyper-digital age.

Differences between unsolicited and solicited diaries

A key distinction to make before discussing diary method in any great depth, and in the context of social research, is between unsolicited and solicited diaries. Diaries which people choose to keep voluntarily are an example of an unsolicited diary: no one has asked the diarist to keep the diary. We have already mentioned Alastair Campbell’s prowess in diary keeping, and many others in the political arena have maintained and published an unsolicited diary, including Galeazzo Cino (1903–1944), Foreign Minister of Fascist Italy, and Tony Benn (1925–2014), British Labour politician, to name just two. Some individuals seem to be natural diarists and committed to recording their lives for others to read.

Unsolicited diaries have been kept by men and women and have been published for centuries. The Diaries of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) is perhaps one of the earliest and most well-known examples of an unsolicited diary, but there are countless other examples written by ordinary people, some of whom find themselves in extraordinary situations, which have been published. As well as the Diary of Anne Frank, there is Dorothea’s War, which comprise the diaries of the First World War nurse Dorothea Crewdson; and the diaries of Martha Ballard (1785–1812), a midwife living in New England, have been researched and used by an historian to explore the community life and health care of post-revolutionary America (Ulrich, 1991). While these are fascinating accounts of everyday life, they are not the main focus of this book, which perhaps should be more accurately entitled: What is solicited diary method?

Solicited diaries are diaries that people have been asked to keep for a particular reason, notably for research purposes. This approach, in which a participant records his or her thoughts, feelings and/or behaviours under the direction of an individual researcher, has been part of the researcher’s toolkit since the 1930s and is the main focus of this book. Perhaps one of the earliest and best examples of a traditional solicited diary is the Mass Observation Project (MOP), described below.

The Mass Observation Project (MOP) has been recording everyday life in the UK since 1937, when they called for people from all parts of the country to record everything they did from when they woke up in the morning to when they went to sleep at night on 12th May. This was the day of George VI’s coronation. The resulting diaries provide a glimpse into the everyday lives of people across Britain and have become an invaluable resource for those researching countless aspects of the era.

The MOP was revived in 1981 and currently has a national panel of 500 volunteer participants who respond to ‘Directives’ or open-ended questions sent to them by post or email three times a year. The Directives contain two or three broad themes, which cover both personal issues and wider political and social issues and events, including, for example, the Scottish Referendum 2014 and Eurovision. Participants retain anonymity and therefore write openly and candidly. Researchers are invited to collaborate with MOP to help develop new directives.

This text and further information about MOP can be found on the website http://www.massobs.org.uk/mass_observation_project.html.

Another example of how and why a diary might be solicited to gain rich insights into a certain aspect of life can be seen in relation to the activities of think tanks. In May 2014, the Commission on the Future of the Home Care Workforce solicited a series of diaries from home care workers and published these on their website as a blog. The diary blogs provide an account of the home care workers’ visits to people with high support needs and the range of challenges they encounter, notably a lack of time to engage with service users and talk to them about their care needs. An extract from one of the blogs is given below.

Monday

Well it was a struggle to get out of bed today, day 15 without a break. I have to work extra to be able to afford essential repairs to my car, without the car I am limited to the amount of work I can do and areas would need to be restricted meaning less money to live on. Yet there is no petrol allowance or consideration to the increase in my insurance.

My first call today is to assist a lady out of bed; it’s a two person call as she is very disabled. When I arrived there was an awful smell, I then noticed that her commode had not been emptied the night before and had been placed right next to her bed, how she managed to sleep is a wonder! We have 1 hour to assist but once she is safely seated I left the other carer to assist with her breakfast and tidying up as my next call often takes much more time than is allocated.

This text and further information about the project can be found on the website http://www.lgiu.org.uk/2014/05/12/diary-of-a-home-care-worker-part-1/.

Each blog ends with the amount of miles the care worker has travelled and the total sum of unpaid travel and work time. These entries highlight the need for more investment into social care and reveal the value of solicited diary method for giving voice to a group of people who may go unheard, in this case, home care workers. However, while these provide useful examples of solicited diary method, these approaches are not the main focus of the book either. Rather, our focus is on how solicited diary method has been and could be used as part of an individual researcher’s toolkit to collect data about a given phenomenon.

Solicited diaries as part of researcher’s toolkit

Asking people to keep a regular record of their experiences can capture rich data on personal events, motives, feelings and beliefs in an unobtrusive way and over a period of time. Researchers who use diary method come from a wide range of disciplines, including health sciences, medicine, economics, sports science, human geography, transport planning, psychology and gerontology. As such, the method has evolved as a data collection tool over the years.

Today there are various forms of solicited diary, each one reflecting researchers’ particular domain of interest and preference in terms of study design. Perhaps one of the most established forms of solicited diary is the time diary. This involves participants recording events at a specified time or between a particular time frame. Time diaries are favoured by researchers wishing to examine patterns of behaviour and draw some kind of comparison. For example, in one study, researchers invited 165 couples with children to fill out a separate time diary for two days – a typical workday and non-workday for twenty-four hours. The time-diary technique allowed them to compare mothers’ and fathers’ reported involvement with childcare (Bureau, Services, & Science, 2005).

Another popular form of solicited diary is the travel diary. This is often used by transport planning researchers to elicit data regarding travel behaviour. Participants are typically asked to self-record the details of every journey they make on each occasion they can make it, so in effect the diary becomes an extended survey. This form of diary was used in the German Mobidrive study, which involved recruiting a total of 317 persons in 139 households to keep a six-week travel diary to investigate the rhythms of daily life and travel (Axhausen, Löchl, Schlich, Buhl, & Widmer, 2006).

Other forms of solicited diary have evolved within the health sciences to research health-related behaviours or bodily functions. For example, the ‘food-diary method’ has been used by researchers to investigate the eating and drinking patterns of healthy and diabetic subjects; this particular form of diary is so widely used it has ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Series foreword
• 1 The development of diary techniques for research
• 2 Engaging with diary techniques
• 3 Practical issues with diary techniques: Design and analysis
• 4 The rise of technology and its influences on diary methods
• 5 Exploring issues of participation, control and ethics
• 6 Methodological issues and future directions
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright