Evaluation Resource Centre

Diaries

A popular method in various areas of social research is the Diary kept by the research subject. This method has the advantage that data can be collected without the direct involvement of the researcher in the actual data collection process.

Process

A diary can take many different forms. For example:

Market researchers ask people to keep diaries about product use or about television viewing.

Counselling psychologists may ask a client to keep a diary of the circumstances under which they feel anxious.

The diary can be very formally structured so that information is recorded on a daily basis at certain times:

You might be interested in the way students utilise their non-class time while at college. So you develop a diary format that marks out the times when the students do not have classes and you ask them to note down what they are doing during those times.

On the other hand you could be interested in the general impact of something over some defined period of time:

You have developed some learning exercises that you hope will help the students develop a deeper understanding of your subject matter. You ask the students to note down their impressions of the exercises after they complete each one.

Analysing Diary Data

The diary method is a qualitative method and therefore there is no simple way to bring the data together. You will use some method for organising the responses you get from the respondents.

Basic

Read each response and place it into piles that reflect some likely division of the data - for example, liked the program, didn't like the program and not sure

Read each of these piles to see if there are any commonly reported diary themes within a pile.

Cross-check to see if a theme is expressed in different ways in each basic pile.

Restructure the piles until you think they represent classifications of the data that you can report.

More Advanced

Carry out a content analysis on all the diary entries.

Allocate each of the responses to the dominant area of content that it contains - as derived from the content analysis.

Compare the groupings of respondents that this creates - see if they have similar areas of content in the minor categories from the analysis.

Continue to reallocate respondents to possible descriptive groups until you think that you have a clear feel for what the respondents are telling you through their diaries.

You then have the basis for organising and writing up your data.

Reporting Diary Data

There is no simple cook-book to help you report the analysis of diary data. It is usually quite complex.

Your basic starting point has to be to decide how you are going to talk about the material that impacts directly on the evaluation process:

The general content of the diaries gave us a rich set of data that can be dealt with in many ways. In the first section of the report I will focus upon the way they directly answer the question 'Was the unit educationally effective?.

Then you might try to describe the general trends and use specific examples:

Many students regularly reported that they were feeling challenged by the unit. Fortunately for me, this was not accompanied by negative comments although some did mention that they were becoming fatigued with the overall workload. The impression I gained was that most were positive about the challenge because they felt that they were getting into the core of the subject matter. For example:

'Cool material. I haven't seen why that worked before. It took some work - the results were worth it'