How to Create a Diary Study (Plus Example)

I did my first diary study recently and found that there weren’t a ton of free resources out there on how to create and run one.

With my knowledge of and background in design research, I was able to create a successful study after compiling a handful of articles, podcasts, and Pinterest pins. In this article, I will share all the information and tips I have on diary studies to help the next researcher confidently create their own.

Note: This study was an independent project I did on my own time during the COVID19 pandemic. Therefore, I was not working with a budget or a timeline. Participants were my friends who were kind enough to give me their time.

What is a Diary Study?

First and foremost, let’s talk about what a diary study is. A diary study is a qualitative research method by which the participants of the study create journal entries in relation to a recurring event. The self-reporting by participants allows researchers to gain insight on a particular group of people’s behaviors, relations, and/ or attitudes surrounding a particular research focus.

When to Do a Diary Study

An example of a research focus could be shopping habits of a target market. Say you work at an e-commerce website that caters to young mothers. You might want to understand where these young mothers are shopping, who they are listening to, and why they choose to buy one product over another.

A diary study would be a great tool here for a couple of reasons:

1. You know who your target customer is. Diary studies are generally expensive and time consuming. (I was able to get away with this for free, because my hours were unpaid and the participants were friends I had coerced.) You want to be certain the insights each participant offers are truly valuable.
2. You don’t know what you need to know. If you are in a discovery phase, this method is brilliant. It can help you realize a pain point you couldn’t have fathomed yourself or understand how context plays into customer behavior.
3. You need specific instances, not generalizations. If you need to understand what people actually do, not just what they say they do, a diary study could be very useful. A person might say they shop 3 to 5 times a week, but the diary study may show it’s actually more like 15 times. Additionally, each of those instances of shopping could be quite varied in what they are shopping for, where they are shopping, etc. You might have reason for wanting to have insight to each of those instances rather than asking them for generalizations in an interview or survey.
4. You can’t observe the participant yourself. When comparing methods to use, you might find yourself struggling to choose between a diary study and observation. These two different ethnographic methods require similar investment and offer similar insight potential. However, there could be several reasons you can’t do observation. Your participants could be geographically spread out or hard to get to. Additionally, if your physical presence might affect a participant’s behavior, you might highly consider a diary study. For example, a participant might do a particular task differently or not at all if they are being watched.

How to Run a Diary Study

Okay, so you think a diary study is for you. How do you actually go about creating one? (I’m skipping past the logistics of timing and budget, since I personally didn’t have the constraints on either.)

Have a Goal

Before you curate the diary study, have a clear understanding of what it should help you accomplish. I put myself in the shoes of a researcher at a computer/ technology company. With the stay-at-home orders, I figured a challenge the company is currently facing is understanding how the indefinite closure of office buildings will impact demand for their products. A goal for the diary study could be keeping products relevant when the new norm is working from home. Keeping that goal in mind, my research question became “What communication challenges are employees facing while working from home?”

Recruitment

Once I had the question my study needed to answer, I could create a screener to select the right participants. Here are some things to keep in mind for a diary study screener:

• Make sure your participant actually engages in the activity you want to study. As my research was on communication, I wanted to be sure my participants were actually engaging in regular conversations with other people.
• Make sure your participant will be engaging in the activity you want them to diary about for the time frame of the study. Again, my study was on working from home, so I made sure they would remain working from home during the study.
• Understand how specific you want your participants to be. Are you willing to accept people on the fringes? For example, I decided to only include participants who weren’t regularly accustomed to working from home and worked at least 4 days of the week. You might decide you could get valuable insights from a few fringe participants. If so, you might still want to at least know they are on the fringe before starting the study. Therefore, I recommend still asking the fringe indicator questions in the screener even if the answers don’t screen participants out.
• Within your target market, try to get a diverse pool of participants. I recommend asking additional demographic questions, so you can minimize blind spots and biases. I wanted a variety of professions and ages if I could manage it, for example. An engineer has different communication habits and challenges than someone in sales or customer service.

Once you’ve picked your participants from those who passed the screener, reconfirm that they would indeed like to participate by sending them a breakdown of what you expect from them.

I told my participants about a pre-questionnaire that would take about 15 to 20 min, a briefing phone call for 10 min, the diary study which would last 5 days and take 15 min each day, and a follow up interview lasting no more than 45 min.

Also, ask participants how they would like to be contacted. I was sending a form that required quite a bit of typing, so all my participants preferred email for that. For quick reminders or updates, they each suggested their preferred messaging app.

Pre-Questionnaire

I chose to have a questionnaire that participants completed prior to starting the study for a couple reasons. The first reason was to customize the study for each participant. This is not typical (from what I’ve seen). However, it didn’t make sense for participants to record every conversation they had in a workday. To decide which conversations participants should journal about, I used the pre-questionnaire to understand which conversations were typically in-person prior to shelter-in-place. For some that meant team video calls. For others that meant email or IM with coworkers.

The second reason I did a pre-questionnaire was to understand context that didn’t change. I wanted to know things like where participants were working and what hardware they had and how big their company was. These questions didn’t need to be asked every day in a diary entry.

I used Google Sheets for participants to fill out the pre-questionnaire. Once completed and before the briefing, I added 5 more tabs for each day of the study. I recognize this seems an unconventional choice for a form-like document. However, I liked having tabs so a participant could just focus on one day at a time, but also have the ability to reference a previous day or the pre-questionnaire if desired.

There is a major downside to not having a form tool for a diary study. That is having to consolidate all the data yourself. Managing 20 Google Sheets isn’t exactly a dream. Be sure to strike the balance between finding a tool that works best for you and one that works best for your participants.

Briefing

Once I decided which type of conversation I was going to have my participant diary about, I walked them through the diary entries over a phone call. This way they understood what I was looking for and could ask any questions they had.

Diary Entries

One big decision you’ll need to make in relation to the diary entries is whether you want participants to do in-situ entries or snippet entries. In-situ entries involve the participants filling out the diary study at the time of the event they are capturing. Imagine they just made a purchase on Amazon. For in-situ entries, they would immediately fill out the entry following this purchase.

Conversely, snippet entries allow participants to record minimal information at the time of the event and complete the full entry later. Imagine the participant needs to record their trip to a store. They can send a text right after they complete their shopping experience, continue on with other errands, and be reminded later in the day to journal about that experience.

I chose snippet entries because I didn’t want to interrupt the participant’s day. If they got off a call and were feeling ready to dive into that project they just got assigned, I didn’t want them to have to fill out my entry instead. I didn’t feel much information was lost by having the participant fill out the entry at the end of the day as opposed to in-situ, but you may find in-situ to be critical for your study.

I managed this technique by sending a text reminder or setting a calendar reminder for each participant towards the end of their workday. (During the briefing, I asked them what time would work for them.) As a note, I did not dissuade my participants from filling out the forms in-situ, if they preferred to do so.

Here’s some things to consider when deciding what the entry should include:

• Getting context. Sometimes you need simple contextual questions like “Where did you make your purchase?”. Maybe you even want context to how the person is feeling as well. Make sure you are asking the right questions to get that context you require in absence of you being there in person.
• Value. The real meat will be in the more open-ended questions. You want to provide space (literally and figuratively) for the participant to fill you in on things you don’t know you don’t know.
• Length. Participant engagement is critical. A couple of thoughtfully filled out responses will be more valuable than a ton of poorly filled out ones.
• Mental strain. You might find that you require some questions that are cognitively demanding. Keep these to a minimum and alternate them with some easier questions.
• Monotony. Will they get bored when they answer the same question for the 15th time and just write “same as yesterday”? If you have a question you want to ask more than once but don’t need it every single day, change up your entries. I had 8 questions I kept the same for every single entry. I then had 2 questions that changed each day. That way I got answers more than once (participants had more than one entry each day), but I didn’t bore participants or get repetitive information.

I recommend including a sample entry for participants to reference. It’s no surprise that sometimes people misunderstand what you are asking. They might also question how much detail you want. Give an example to help guide them. Having an example entry makes entries easier for participants and more valuable for you.

Sample Journal Entry

As you can see in the sample entry above, the first 3 items in my journal entry are part of the snippet. A participant would fill these out in the moment, so they could remember which conversations to journal about at the end of their day.

The last 2 questions changed each day. These were intended to keep some variety in the entries.

The structure of each entry was intended to do two things. The first was to obtain the realest insights into the participants’ conversations. The second was to help the participant debrief in a guided way. For example, I asked for the name of the conversation and its goal so that the participant could focus at a high level first before diving into the details of each conversation.

Engagement

Engagement is the hardest part of a diary study. You absolutely need participants to finish out the study for their data to be of any use.

There are two ways to keep participants engaged beyond making a clear and easy to complete study: monetary incentives and social pressure. Again, I didn’t have the ability to encourage participants to finish with a monetary incentive. However, in my research on diary studies, everyone suggested spreading out the payments at the beginning, middle, and end. Read more on that from Neilson Norman Group here.

I relied heavily on social pressure to maximize participation. Since participants were my friends, they knew already that they were going to have to see me again knowing they let me down if they didn’t finish.

However, you don’t need people to be your friends to not want to let you down. In order to incite a sense of obligation in participants, you need to engage in a human way with them almost every day. Let them know you are reading their journal entries. Send them a follow up question to something they said. Say, “Thanks for filling in so much detail on your entries from yesterday!” This sort of personal feedback lets participants know there is an actual human on the other end of the study counting on them.

Follow-up Interview

Once the diary study is complete, you may want to do a follow-up interview. Use findings from the entries to inform the interview questions. This interview will give you a chance to dig deeper into interesting things the diary study made you aware of.

Pilot

Run a pilot. Even if you do it with a friend or coworker, it’s 1000% better to come across a technology kink or misunderstood question before you send the study out to 20 people. For example, in my pilot, I found that my pre-questionnaire didn’t actually give me the entirety of the context I was looking for. I simply added a question for the next round.

I will say that my favorite thing about doing this diary study was the ability it gave me to get a first-person narrative of the situation I was trying to understand. The questions I asked and the way my participants responded allowed me to practically experience their working day along with them. Participants really wrote like it was a diary. They had no shame in complaining about coworkers, explaining how they would improve a meeting, or going into detail about how dogs and cats play a new role in getting to know their team.

My least favorite thing about this study was recruitment. Asking people for such a big favor was painful. Recruitment, however, can be made much easier with a budget (I think).

While each diary study is incredibly unique, I hope you find the example and recommendations here a helpful guide for your diary study. If you have any feedback, tool suggestions, or questions feel free to reach out. Happy researching!