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).”

“(e.g., Bolger et al., 2003; Ferrer et al., 2013), and ecological momentary assessments (e.g., Hedeker et al., 2008).”

“Further, the authors recommend providing guidelines on clear expectations around entering data as close to the event as possible 32 , including the time interval allowed between the event occurring and reporting when not entered contemporaneously.”

“Compared to traditional diary studies that fully rely on participant-initiated entries [8], ESM reduces recall bias and improves data quality [92] with prompts ranging from open-ended to binary and multiple-choice questions [1, 57, 77].”

“This method also reduces recall bias by collecting data close to the time of experience, thereby leading to more reliable data (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“Vyas et al. observe that exploration occurs throughout the collaborative design process, spanning activities from brainstorming to developing interaction mechanisms to evaluating prototypes 26 .”

“By allowing adolescents to report their daily social experiences, thoughts, and emotions in real world contexts, these methods minimize retrospective bias, increase ecological validity, and capture real-time psychosocial functioning (Bolger et al., 2003; Russell & Gajos, 2020).”

“A common complaint with paper diaries relates to participants forgetting to complete diary entries, and then either missing or backdating entries (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“This approach enables us to capture the natural occurrence of individuals’ prosocial behavior with minimized recall bias, collecting more accurate responses with increased ecological validity (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“This study investigated the associations of daily stressors and events with fatigue at both within-and between-person levels, distinguishing day-to-day variation in exposure to stressors and events from the average level of exposure (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“Previous research has established this method as an effective way of analyzing participants’ daily lives and the activities and thoughts that arise on a day-to-day basis (Bolger, Davis, and Rafaeli 2003; Jose 2015).”

“Obtaining daily stressor information over this short time frame helps alleviate concerns with ecological validity and retrospective memory bias (35).”

“Psychological stress has a more collective context from the perspective of data collection, but it is highly subjective, resulting in low availability and low credibility [3].”

“Another possibility is to look at the change directly and less retrospectively, for example, using diary studies (Bolger et al. 2003 ).”

“An advantage of the experience sampling method used in this study is that reports of events and experiences are in their natural, spon-taneous context (Bolger, Davis, and Rafaeli 2003).”

“Another popular class of methods builds on cultural probes that share many of the desirable qualities of diary methods (Bolger and Rafaeli 2003; Gaver, Dunne, and Pacenti 1999).”

“Furthermore, daily questionnaires allowed us to capture processes as they occurred in individuals ’ own environments, maximizing ecological validity and speaking to what distinguished a good day from a bad day (Bolger et al., 2003; Hoppmann & Riediger, 2009).”

“Thus, they might represent a ‘window’ to complex experiences and feelings (Bernays, Rhodes, and Jankovic Terzic 2014), also generating a trail of information while the phenomena unfold that can be represented and reflected on over time (Bolger, Davis, and Rafaeli 2003).”

“…to traditional diary methods, this approach not only enhances the reliability of results by simplifying study design and reducing participant burden but also improves the authenticity of research by capturing within-individual changes over time and individual differences in those changes [50,51].”

“To mitigate the risks associated with self-reports, the study employed the media diary method, which helps to minimize recall errors (Bolger et al., 2003) and which can provide a reliable and valid measurement of media usage (Juster, 1986; Juster and Stafford, 1991; Bolger et al., 2003).”

“These methods improve ecological validity by reducing retrospective bias and state-congruent recall (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“These multimedia messages allow for nearly real-time observation of tasks and serve as a cognitive aid during the postobservation interview [46,47].”

“Diaries are also a valuable source of rich information in quality research (Bolger, Davis, & Rafaeli, 2003; Altricher, 2005) as it helps researchers to organize their thoughts and make them conceivable.”

“We assessed individuals’ emotional experiences in daily life using a momentary assessment approach during the transition to parenthood [69].”

“This approach aligns with the perspective of researchers who stress the importance of examining experiences in their “natural, spontaneous” settings (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“5,20 For this study, the mean score of the five negative affect items was used to assess daily affect.”

“We use a diary approach to map the dynamics in nurses’ job characteristics as it includes “time” as a factor (Bolger et al., 2003; Chan et al., 2018).”

“We suggest that future research consider how interpartner concordance in AL varies by different dimensions of relationship dynamics such as arguments, complaints, disagreements, and other real-time interactions better captured by a diary study design (80).”

“Diary studies are an appropriate method for researching experiences in contexts, which are natural and spontaneous (Bolger et al., 2003) and to capture variations in experiences soon after they take place (Day & Thatcher, 2009).”

“While common in daily diary studies [53], this form of assessment limits our ability to disentangle the temporal associations between self-compassion and coping within a given day, as well as increases the risk of participant responses being subject to recall bias [53, 54].”

“Se refiere a una de las técnicas que hacen parte de los denominados “métodos diarios” (Bolger et al., 2003; Brough, 2018), “métodos de la vida diaria” (Engel, 2005; Gillen et al., 2007; Mehl & Conner, 2012) o “métodos longitudinales intensivos” (Bolger & Laurenceau, 2013).”

“Given the longitudinal design of this study, we decided to use single-item measures to reduce fatigue and maximise participation over time (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“Other methods for measuring positive psychosocial factors, such as ecological momentary assessments [59] and daily diaries [60], were not considered for this study.”

“Therefore, compared to other methods such as traditional questionnaire studies, diaries are ‘closer to life’ and are less susceptible to recall bias [8].”

“Thus, even for such straightforward queries, one advantage of diary-based data is the elimination of systematic and random causes of measurement error, resulting in an increase in validity and reliability (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“Methods such as daily diaries (Bolger et al., 2003) or experience sampling (Hektner et al., 2007) allow for such measurement and have become widely used in various fields of psychological research; to date, however, only a small number of TTP or early parenting studies have used such methods to…”

“This involves capturing ‘life as it is lived’ (Bolger et al ., 2003) by recording individuals’ behaviour in their environments and over time (Trull and Ebner-Priemer, 2014).”

“The literature also recommended that the information given to teachers about diaries should be detailed, and the diaries should be checked at every stage (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“Given the extensive nature of the daily protocol, and to ensure compliance with it (Bolger et al., 2003), the scales needed to be shorter than 10 items each, which will affect internal reliability estimates when items are the units of analysis (Cronbach, 1951).”

“situations and settings, where the cognitive, behavioural dispositions and affective components of interest acutely develop and occur [24][25].”

“Research in various disciplines investigates how human behavior, experiences, and cognition unfold over time, how theseprocessesdifferbetweenindividuals,andhowthesedif-ferences relate to long-term outcomes such as mental health (Bolger et al., 2003; Browning et al., 2024; Shiffman et al., 2008).”

“Ecological momentary assessment using mobile health platforms could reduce recall bias and capture real-time adherence patterns (141, 142).”

“Diary studies are widely used in HCI as an effective data collection method to capture what people do in-situ, whilst also enabling participant reflection [14, 73, 88].”

“Daily diary studies reveal that motivational states fl uctuate substantially within individuals across days, patterns that remain invisible in cross-sectional surveys (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“This method may better reflect nuances in employees’ experience in evening sharing [60, 61].”

“The advantage of the diary is that it captures these processes in ways that more traditional methods (e.g. interviews, surveys) cannot (Bolger et al., 2003), offering a ‘ deeper understanding of a person ’ s actions, experiences, thoughts, and emotion around a particular topic ’ 9 (Bartlett &…”

“Similarly, research based on ongoing diaries (e.g., Bolger et al. 2003) shows the potential to reveal thoughts and assumptions that otherwise often remain too implicit to share.”

“Conversely, longer-term assessments (e.g., weekly or monthly measures) may overlook short-term fluctuations that contribute to day-to-day mood regulation and social withdrawal (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“Diary methods are widely employed in the disciplines of psychology (Bolger et al., 2003; Day and Thatcher, 2009), health (Elliott, 1997; Mendoza et al., 2021; McCombie et al., 2024b), and increasingly education (Baker, 2023; Cao and Henderson, 2021), where topics such as mental health,…”

“Daily diaries reduce retrospective bias (Bolger et al., 2003), but imposes a signi fi - cant burden on participants, and some aspects of job searches, such as the total time invested in the search, may be dif fi cult to self-report even on a daily basis.”

“The diary study was a combination of interval-contingent design, i.e., recording at regular intervals (in this case, the end of their working day), and event-contingent design, i.e., recording at the occurrence of an event (in this case, after a videoconfer-encing meeting; Bolger et al., 2003).”

“”These models can be completed in several modeling frameworks, including structural equation modeling [121–123], multilevel modeling [124–126], autoregressive modeling [127, 128], and Granger causal modeling [129–133].”

“The use of a daily diary design also allows for examination of the effect of supportive equity by determining days in which support provision and receipt were reciprocal between partners (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“We conducted a diary study [5, 58, 63] with our screen-reader participants that lasted five days.”

“Besides, it has higher ecological validity because it is measured daily in a spontaneous and continuous environment (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“The current study explores the longitudinal development of multiple interests by using experience sampling methodology (ESM) data collected with a smartphone application, which is fi t for capturing daily life experiences (Bolger et al., 2003).”

“What distinguishes diary methods from other methods is that diary protocols require participants to make self-reports repeatedly over time (Bolger, Davis, and Rafaeli 2003).”

“17 It allows the investigation of events and experiences in their natural context and is particularly suitable for studying change processes during major events and transitions, 18 such as during surgery and postsurgical recovery.”

“Daily measures are generally indicative of individual’s daily life beyond the measured period, 41 but prospective studies are needed to verify directional associations.”

“In the current research, we tested these predictions as they pertain to satisfaction and responsiveness in everyday life, using ecologically valid daily diary methods (Bolger et al., 2003).”