Diary Methods: Capturing Life as it is Lived

“The perils of retrospection have been reviewed elsewhere (e.g., Nisbett & Wilson 1977, Ross 1989, Tourangeau et al. 2000).”

“This decomposition follows the standard approach for intensive longitudinal data, in which repeated daily observations separate stable between-person differences from within-person variation across days 31 .”

“…are particularly well designed for understanding within-person processes, temporal fluctuations, and short-term changes in psychological states [6, 8, 9, 64, 68], whereas cross-sectional variables primarily capture relatively stable between-person differences at a single time point [65, 69,…”

“…within-person variability and day- to-day experiences, such as daily diary approaches, which reduce recall bias and can disentangle between-and within-person processes (Bolger et al., 2003; Fisher & To, 2012; Janssens et al., 2018; Lischetzke et al., 2021; Miles, 2017; Silvia & Cotter, 2021).”

“Our mixed methods approach involves combining a quantitative measuring instrument such as the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) [22] and a common qualitative evaluation instrument, diary studies [23].”

“These lapses can be especially consequential among people with more severe symptoms or higher stress [1, 11], and missing or delayed entries can introduce recall bias that degrades metrics such as sleep efficiency, sleep onset latency, and wake after sleep onset [16, 28, 59].”

“…to conduct the study over 7 days was motivated by its common usage in daily diary studies (e.g., Curran et al., 2015; Totenhagen et al., 2013; Vandewalle et al., 2017; Young et al., 2013) and the aim to maximize participant retention while minimizing potential fatigue (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“Diary methods offer ecological validity that laboratory-based attention tasks cannot provide, capturing experiences in situ and reducing the recall bias inherent in retrospective interviews [10].”

“Experience Sampling Methods (ESM), diary studies, and sensor-based approaches have been widely used to capture affective or cognitive states while attempting to minimize recall bias [1, 2, 8].”

“Event-contingent and participant-initiated reporting have a long methodological history in diary research (Bolger, Davis, and Rafaeli 2003) but have been underused in EMA, where the dominant design choice has been signal-contingent prompting on a fixed schedule.”

“We expect differences between these measures, sincedaily diary measurements are contextualized to the daily life scenarios we are interested in, and are less biased by recall errors when participants are asked to report aggregations of experiences overlongertimeperiods 73 .”

“Daily life methods such as diaries can offer a window on how people feel, think, and behave in response to real life events, while limiting recall bias and enhancing ecological validity (Bolger et al. 2003; Trull and Ebner-Priemer 2020).”

“It is answered daily using a “right now” time frame, which better captures momentary mood fluctuations [24–26].”

“Besides minimizing recall bias through reporting in daily contexts, it facilitates the detection of short‐ term variations that may be obscured in conventional long‐term or retrospective designs (Bolger et al. 2003).”

“Our ability to examine longitudinal and lagged relationships is a key strength because it provides insights into the temporal relationship among constructs (Bolger et al. 2003 ; Caruana et al. 2015 ).”

“DSEM can be applied to longitudinal data with hours or days between assessments (e.g., ecological momentary assessment data, Smyth & Stone, 2003; daily diary studies, Bolger et al., 2003).”

“As Rieman (1993) and Bolger et al. (2003) argued, diary studies capture in-situ experiences that retrospective methods miss — the daily frustrations, evolving adaptations, and gradual recognition that costs may outweigh bene fi ts.”

“The study utilized three complementary data types: (1) interviews with Frank and two of his employees, (2) diary data (Bolger et al., 2003), and (3) archival data and the lead researcher’s observations.”

“The present study used a 10-day daily diary design in a school context to capture the within-day dynamic coupling between elementary students’ daily life events and affect, thereby enhancing ecological validity in a naturalistic setting (Bolger et al., 2003 ).”

“Compared to traditional cross-sectional designs, the diary method allows for capturing the temporal dynamics of psychological variables in naturalistic settings, thereby enhancing ecological validity and temporal resolution (Bolger et al., 2003 ).”

“Participants then completed truncated versions or single items from validated scales that have been used in past research (e.g., Balzarini et al., 2021, 2023), and selected to reduce survey length and fatigue, increase efficiency, and minimize participant attrition (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“Moreover, by capturing “life as lived” and decreasing participant burden of recall, EMAs help to increase ecological validity (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“This approach provides more nuanced and detailed insights into employees ’ everyday experiences of technology-mediated work (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“Of the original 114 participants, n = 14 opted out of the diary portion and n = 16 were excluded for completing too few diaries (i.e., less than 2 SDs below the mean number, per Bolger et al., 2003).”

“For instance, participants reported their daily emotions every day across the course of 11 weeks, which a) allowed us to analyze the longitudinal course of their emotions and (b) tends to be less prone to retrospective bias (Bolger et al., 2003; Schwarz 2007).”

“Approaches such as daily diary and ecological momentary assessment (EMA) have shown that emotional experiences comprise both relatively stable components and meaningful short-term fluctuations across days and weeks [36,37].”

“This technique requires participants to answer end-of-day reports over the course of several days or weeks (Nezlek, 2012) and captures daily emotional experiences as they are lived (Bolger, 2003).”

“Daily experiences are important to understand, as these daily experiences add up to in fl uence people ’ s overall relationship evaluations and outcomes over time (Bolger et al., 2003; G¨otz et al., 2022).”

“An event-contingent diary design was utilized where the participants had to fill the diary entry every time the specific phenomenon occurs (Bolger et al., 2003 ).”

“On the one hand, WAB may change daily, or even within a workday, suggesting that daily diary designs are a practical approach (Bolger et al., 2003; Gabriel et al., 2019).”

“Conducting a daily diary study, for example, would stand-ardize recall and would allow more room to assess causality through lagged analyses of relationship and/or sexual satisfaction and fantasy content and context, but would necessitate more brevity in our measures (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“Contemporaneous diary reflections were used to capture participants’ lived experiences of burnout in ways not accessible through interviews alone (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“Diary studies allow participants to provide ‘frequent reports on the events and experiences of their daily lives’ (Bolger et al., 2003, p. 579).”

“Prior research has demonstrated that a two-week duration effectively captures daily behavioral patterns while minimizing participant fatigue (Bolger et al., 2003; Ganzach & Bulmash, 2021; Kuppens et al., 2022).”

“In Study 1a, couples completed a 14-day daily experience survey that allowed us to capture multiple instances in which partners expressed and perceived gratitude in daily life, providing high reliability and capturing couples ’ interactions naturalistically (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“Finally, we also include diary day as a covariate to account for change over time, consistent with recommended procedures in daily diary methodology (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“24,25 By showing both consistencies and inconsistencies between questionnaires and daily diary data (see section 4.2), this study emphasizes how different types of measures may capture distinct aspects of change.”

“Analyses included a control for day of survey (day 1–day 10) to help account for potential unmeasured effects related to time, such as habituation to the daily diary survey instrument (Bolger et al. 2003; Bolger and Laurenceau 2013).”

“…short responses describing specific and temporally sensitive insights, more traditional diary methods - which afford participants greater freedom to determine the scope and structure of entries - may be better suited to long-form narrative and broad, participant-led accounts of experience [10].”

“The diary data was proxy for participant observation and facilitated the study of events in their natural setting, a key element of ethnography [38].”

“This technique, recommended by Bolger et al. (2019), is a valuable tool because it encourages self-observation and allows for capturing participants’ emotional and cognitive evolution in real time.”

“Incorporating multiple methods and informants—such as behavioral observations of prosocial behavior, objective SES indicators, and daily diary methods—would strengthen measurement validity and provide more ecological insights into resilience processes (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“Whilst interviews facilitate ‘ stimulated recall ’ , diaries also elicit ‘ stimulated re fl ection ’ (see Harvey et al., 2012), providing further opportunities for ‘ capturing life as it is lived ’ (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“Second, collecting daily assessments allowed us to capture fine-grained fluctuations in couples’ sexual behavior and stress, minimizing recall bias (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“Daily diary methodology may offer one of the best approximations of the processes individuals experience in their everyday lives (Bolger et al., 2003; Galovan et al., 2023), thus providing a useful tool to examine the role of partner-schemas in shaping daily relationship experiences.”

“Daily diary studies, such as the ones employed here, provide powerful and ecologically valid data (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“This diary method aimed to capture ongoing inclusion experiences within participants ’ contexts (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“A ‘structured diary’ or ‘daily diary’ method is considered effective at capturing ‘life as it is lived’ and is especially useful for recording mood and emotional states (of significance to this project) (Bolger et al., 2003; Conway and Briner, 2002; DeLongis et al., 1992).”

“Smartphone apps enable ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) to capture feelings, emotions, and health-related aspects throughout the day [35 – 38], and can be used as digital travel diaries as well [39].”

“Similar to other qualitative and diary studies, study 1, 2, and 3 involved small sample sizes, which limited the generalizability of our findings to broader populations (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“As an intensive longitudinal study, we fit a series of multilevel models to account for the nested structure of our data (ie, observations nested within people) to investigate the aims previously defined [20,21].”

“One persistent issue is maintaining participation throughout the duration of the study [19].”

“Though diary studies are touted for reducing the likelihood of retrospection and memory lapses by minimising elapsed time between experience and account of the experience (Bolger et al., 2003), retrospection, reflection, and disclosure may be beneficial to participants.”

“Diary methods have been described as particularly useful when studying change processes during major events and transitions (Bolger et al., 2003), such as post-surgical recovery.”

“They are particularly valuable for capturing small, everyday experiences (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“Diary entries allowed the researchers to examine participants’ experiences in their natural, spontane-ous context, rather than retrospectively, reducing the risk of recall bias by minimizing the time between their experience and their account of it (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“There are a variety of advantages to utilizing daily report methods in college student samples: (1) reduces the possibility of recall bias often found in retro - spective surveys (Shiffman et al., 1997 ); (2) it allows for the ability to examine variance within a person across a short time (Ravert et al., 2010 ); and…”

“However, the use of daily diary data with repeated observations per individual helps enhance statistical power through multilevel modeling (Almeida, 2004; Bolger et al., 2003).”

“Daily diary methodology has participants complete at least one survey over a period of a consecutive number of days in order to capture daily experiences in one’s natural environments (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“This split-role approach aligns with recommendations for disaggregated, context-sensitive self-reporting (Bolger et al., 2003; Tourangeau et al., 2000).”

“At the same time this enables analysis of within-and between-person variability (Bolger et al., 2003).”