Using Diaries

Historians and literary scholars have long considered diary documents to be of major importance for telling history More recently, sociologists have taken seriously the idea of using personal documents to construct pictures of social reality from the actors’ perspective (see Plummer’s 1983 book Documents of Life). In contrast to these ‘journal’ types of accounts, diaries are used as research instruments to collect detailed information about behaviour, events and other aspects of individuals’ daily lives.

Self-completion diaries have a number of advantages over other data collections methods. First, diaries can provide a reliable alternative to the traditional interview method for events that are difficult to recall accurately or that are easily forgotten. Second, like other self-completion methods, diaries can help to overcome the problems associated with collecting sensitive information by personal interview. Finally, they can be used to supplement interview data to provide a rich source of information on respondents’ behaviour and experiences on a daily basis. The ‘diary interview method’ where the diary-keeping period is followed by an interview asking detailed questions about the diary entries is considered to be one of the most reliable methods of obtaining information.

The Subject Matter of Diary Surveys: A popular topic of investigation for economists, market researchers, and more recently sociologists, has been the way in which people spend their time. Accounts of time use can tell us much about quality of life, social and economic well being and patterns of leisure and work. The ‘time-budget’ involved respondents keeping a detailed log of how they allocated their time during the day. More qualitative studies have used a “standard day” diary, which focuses on a typical day in the life of an individual from a particular group or community.

One of the most fruitful time-budget endeavors, initiated in the mid 60s, has been the Multinational Time Budget Time Use Project. Its aim was to provide a set of procedures and guidance on how to collect and analyse time-use data so that valid cross- national comparisons could be made

Two other major areas where diaries are often used are:

• Consumer expenditure and
• Transport planning research.

Other topics covered using diary methods are social networks, health, illness and associated behaviour, diet and nutrition, social work and other areas of social policy, clinical psychology and family therapy, crime behaviour, alcohol consumption and drug usage, and sexual behaviour. Diaries are also increasingly being used in market research.

Using Diaries in Surveys: Diary surveys often use a personal interview to collect additional background information about the household and sometimes about behaviour or events of interest that the diary will not capture (such as large items of expenditure for consumer expenditure surveys). A placing interview is important for explaining the diary keeping procedures to the respondent and a concluding interview may be used to check on the completeness of the recorded entries. Often retrospective estimates of the behaviour occurring over the diary period are collected at the final interview.

Diary Design and Form: At Diaries may be open format, allowing respondents to record activities and events in their own words, or they can be highly structured where all activities are pre-categorized. An obvious advantage of the free format is that it allows for greater opportunity to recode and analyse the data. However, the labour intensive work required to prepare and make sense of the data may render it unrealistic for projects lacking time and resources, or where the sample is large. Although the design of a diary will depend on the detailed requirement of the topic under study, there are certain design aspects, which are common to most. Below are sets of guidelines recommended for anyone thinking about designing a diary? Furthermore, the amount of piloting required to perfect the diary format should not be under-estimated.

• An A4 booklet of about 5 to 20 pages is desirable, depending on the nature of the diary. Disappointing, as it might seem, most respondents do not carry their diaries around with them.
• The inside cover page should contain a clear set of instructions on how to complete the diary. This should stress the importance of recording events as soon as possible after they occur and how the respondent should try not to let the diary keeping influence their behaviour.
• A model example of a correctly completed diary should feature on the second page.
• Depending on how long a period the diary will cover, each page denoting either a week, a day of the week or a 24 hour period or less. Pages should be clearly ruled up as a calendar with prominent headings and enough space to enter all the desired information (such as what the respondent was doing, at what time, where, who with and how they felt at the time, and so on).
• Checklists of the items, events or behaviour to help jog the diary keeper’s memory should be printed somewhere fairly prominent. Very long lists should be avoided since they may be off-putting and confusing to respondents. For a structured time budget diary, an exhaustive list of all possible relevant activities should be listed together with the appropriate codes. Where more than one type of activity is to be entered, that is, primary and secondary (or background) activities, guidance should be given on how to deal with “competing” or multiple activities.
• There should be an explanation of what is meant by the unit of observation, such as a “session”, an “event” or a “fixed time block”. Where respondents are given more freedom in naming their activities and the activities are to be coded later, it is important to give strict guidelines on what type of behaviour to include, what definitely to exclude and the level of detail required. Time budget diaries without fixed time blocks should include columns for start and finish times for activities.
• Appropriate terminology or lists of activities should be designed to meet the needs of the sample under study, and if necessary, different versions of the diary should be used for different groups.
• Following the diary pages it is useful to include a simple set of questions for the respondent to complete, asking, among other things, whether the diary-keeping period was atypical in any way compared to usual daily life. It is also good practice to include a page at the end asking for the respondents’ own comments and clarifications of any peculiarities relating to their entries. Even if these remarks will not be systematically analysed, they may prove helpful at the editing or coding stage.

Data Quality and Response Rates

In addition to the types of errors encountered in all survey methods, diaries are especially prone to errors arising from respondent conditioning, incomplete recording of information and under-reporting, inadequate recall, insufficient cooperation and sample selection bias.

Diary Keeping Period The period: Over which a diary is to be kept needs to be long enough to capture the behaviour or events of interest without jeopardizing successful completion by imposing an overly burdensome task for collecting time-use data, anything from one to three day diaries may be used. Household expenditure surveys usually place diaries on specific days to ensure an even coverage across the week and distribute their fieldwork over the year to ensure seasonal variation in earnings and spending is captured.

Reporting Errors: In household expenditure surveys it is routinely found that the first day and first week of diary keeping shows higher reporting of expenditure than the following days. This is also observed for other types of behaviour and the effects are generally termed “first day effects”. They may be due to respondents changing their behaviour as a result of keeping the diary (conditioning), or becoming less conscientious than when they started the diary. Recall errors may also extend to ‘tomorrow’ diaries. Respondents often write down their entries at the end of a day and only a small minority are diligent (and perhaps obsessive!) diary keepers who carry their diary with them at all times. Expenditure surveys find that an intermediate visit from an interviewer during the diary keeping period helps preserve ‘good’ diary keeping to the end of the period.

Literacy: All methods that involve self-completion of information demand that the respondent has a reasonable standard of literacy. Thus the diary sample and the data may be biased towards the population of competent diary keepers.

Participation: The best response rates for diary surveys are achieved when diary keepers are recruited on a face-to-face basis, rather than by post. Personal collection of diaries also allows any problems in the completed diary to be sorted out on the spot. Success may also depend on the quality of interviewing staff that should be highly motivated, competent and well briefed. Appealing to respondent’s altruistic nature, reassuring them of confidentiality and offering incentives are thought to influence co-operation in diary surveys. One research company gives a 10-pound postal order for completion of their fourteen-day diary and other surveys offer lottery tickets or small promotional items.

Coding, Editing and Processing: The amount of work required to process a diary depends largely on how structured it is. For many large-scale diary surveys, the interviewer while still in the field does part has the editing and coding process. Following this is an intensive editing procedure, which includes checking entries against information collected in the personal interview. For unstructured diaries, involving coding of verbatim entries, the processing can be very labour intensive; in much the same way as it is for processing qualitative interview transcripts. Using highly trained coders and a rigorous unambiguous coding scheme is very important particularly where there is no clear demarcation of events or behaviour in the diary entries. Clearly, a well-designed diary with a coherent pre-coding system should cut down on the degree of editing and coding.

Relative Cost of Diary Surveys: The diary method is generally more expensive than the personal interview, and personal placement and pick-up visits are more costly than postal administration. The interviewers usually make at least two visits and are often expected to spend time checking the diary with the respondent. If the diary is unstructured, intensive editing and coding will push up the costs. However, these costs must be balanced against the superiority of the diary method in obtaining more accurate data, particularly where the recall method gives poor results. The ratio of costs for diaries compared with recall time budgets are of the order of three or four to one

Computer Software For Processing and Analysis: Probably the least developed area relating to the diary method is the computer storage and analysis of diary data. One of the problems of developing software for processing and manipulating diary data is the complexity and bulk of the information collected. Although computer assisted methods may help to reduce the amount of manual preparatory work, there are few packages and most of them are custom built to suit the specifics of a particular project. Time-budget researchers are probably the most advanced group of users of machine- readable diary data and the structure of these data allows them to use traditional statistical packages for analysis. More recently, methods of analysis based on algorithms for searching for patterns of behaviour in diary data are being used. Software development is certainly an area, which merits future attention. For textual diaries, qualitative software packages such as The can be used to code them in the same way as interview transcripts.

Archiving Diary Data: In spite of the abundance of data derived from diary surveys across a wide range of disciplines, little is available to other researchers for secondary analysis (further analysis of data already collected). This is perhaps not surprising given that the budget for many diary surveys does not extend to systematic processing of the data. Many diary surveys are small-scale investigative studies that have been carried out with very specific aims in mind. For these less structured diaries, for which a common coding scheme is neither feasible, nor possibly desirable, an answer to public access is to deposit the original survey documents in an archive. This kind of data bank gives the researcher access to original diary documents allowing them to make use of the data in ways to suit their own research strategy. However, the ethics of making personal documents public (even if in the limited academic sense) have to be considered

Internet as a Source of Data: The expansion of the Internet over the past decade has provided the researcher with a range of new opportunities for finding information, networking, conducting research, and disseminating research results.

Through the use of tools such as online focus groups, electronic mail, and online questionnaires, the Internet opens up new possibilities for conducting research. It offers, for example

• Shorter timeframes for collecting and recording data: e-mail messages can be saved and analyzed in qualitative data packages, for example, while online surveys can be captured directly into a database
• The possibility of conducting interviews and focus groups by e-mail, with related savings in costs and time
• New “communities” to serve as the object of social scientific enquiry
• Opportunities for including mixed multiple media in questionnaires

On the other hand, these opportunities also raise new challenges for the researcher, such as: •

• Problems of sampling
• The ethics of conducting research into online communities
• Physical access and skills required to use the technologies involved
• Accuracy and reliability of information obtained from online sources
• The changed chronology of interaction resulting from asynchronous communication

Internet is a useful media to get valuable information and results of various surveys. Access to computer-led data becomes handy in solving many complex mysteries, related to the market place. The 10 ‘C’s outlined here, provide criteria to be considered while evaluating Internet resources:

Content: What is the intent of the content? Are the title and author identified? Is the content “juried?” Is the content “popular” or “scholarly”, satiric or serious? What is the date of the document or article? Is the “edition” current? Do you have the latest version? (Is this important?) How do you know?

Credibility: Is the author identifiable and reliable? Is the content credible? Authoritative? Should it be? What is the purpose of the information, that is, is it serious, satiric, and humorous? Is the URL extension .edu, .com, .gov or .org? What does this tell you about the “publisher”?

Critical Thinking: How can you apply critical thinking skills, including previous knowledge and experience, to evaluate Internet resources? Can you identify the author, publisher, edition, etc. as you would with a “traditionally” published resource? What criteria do you use to evaluate Internet resources?

Copyright: Even if the copyright notice does not appear prominently, someone wrote, or is responsible for, the creation of a document, graphic, sound or image, and the material falls under the copyright conventions. “Fair use” applies to short, cited excerpts, usually as an example for commentary or research. Materials are in the “public domain” if this is explicitly stated. Internet users, as users of print media, must respect copyright.

Citation: Internet resources should be cited to identify sources used, both to give credit to the author and to provide the reader with avenues for further research. Standard style manuals (print and online) provide some examples of how to cite Internet documents, although these standards are not uniform.

Continuity: Will the Internet site be maintained and updated? Is it now and will it continue to be free? Can you rely on this source over time to provide up-to-date information? Some good .edu sites have moved to .com, with possible cost implications. Other sites offer partial use for free, and charge fees for continued or in-depth use.

Censorship: Is your discussion list “moderated”? What does this mean? Does your search engine or index look for all words or are some words excluded? Is this censorship? Does your institution, based on its mission, parent organization or space limitations, apply some restrictions to Internet use? Consider censorship and privacy issues when using the Internet.

Connectivity: If more than one user will need to access a site, consider each users’ access and “functionality.” How do users connect to the Internet and what kind of connection does the assigned resource require? Does access to the resource require a graphical user interface? If it is a popular (busy) resource, will it be accessible in the time frame needed? Is it accessible by more than one Internet tool? Do users have access to the same Internet tools and applications? Are users familiar with the tools and applications? Is the site “viewable” by all Web browsers?

Comparability: Does the Internet resource have an identified comparable print or CD ROM data set or source? Does the Internet site contain comparable and complete information? (For example, some newspapers have partial but not full text information on the Internet.) Do you need to compare data or statistics over time? Can you identify sources for comparable earlier or later data? Comparability of data may or may not be important, depending on your project.

Context: What is the context for your research? Can you find “anything” on your topic, that is, commentary, opinion, narrative, statistics and your quest will be satisfied? Are you looking for current or historical information? Definitions? Research studies or articles? How does Internet information fit in the overall information context of your subject? Before you start searching, define the research context and research needs and decide what sources might be best to use to successfully fill information needs without data overload.