Diary Study As Empirical Method
A diary can be defined as a regular, personal, and contemporaneous record that is created by an individual. Generally, it’s a narrative used to track daily experiences and activities. Diaries have existed for many centuries. Unsurprisingly, keeping a diary was most frequent among the educated. Or among those who lived in cities. While some query why a person might sit alone writing something that nobody will ever read, others feel compelled to keep a diary. Girls often receive a diary as a gift and are, therefore, encouraged to write. Throughout history, the purpose of diaries has constantly changed. Initially, a diary was used for the public. It belonged to the collective before spreading into the private sphere. Once it was used by the individual, the diary started to form part of his/her most secretive, intimate sphere of life eventually. A diary may have multiple purposes. Commonly, it serves to build a memory of its authors by anchoring the past, and the date is the cornerstone of each diary. Intimacy only became a part of it relatively late in its history. First, the diarist writes down the date. Words written underneath it are called ‘entry’. Without such date, it’s merely a notebook. And when edited at a later point, the diary loses its essential characteristic, which is authenticity of the moment. Paper frequently becomes both friend and mirror in this process. Once we’ve projected ourselves onto paper, we can step back and reflect on what we’ve written. The image of our selves that takes shape develops via repetition and change. Written over a long period of time, a diary reveals inconsistencies, biases, and (un)certainties of our selves and of our experiences. Such diary may tell the story of our selves in words. Various other formats are possible. Forms of diaries range from an intimate journal to an interactive blog on the internet. Online, audio, verbal, photo, video, literary and research diaries exist. They can be solicited and unsolicited. With solicited diaries, the researcher designs the diary according to specific research aims.
To me, diaries are fascinating. A diary study is an interesting method that has many benefits. It tries to use sampling of time in the lives of individuals to overcome certain difficulties that are associated with the use of questionnaires, interviews, and other retrospective methods of data collection.
Diary studies enable researchers to follow events in a way that observation often cannot, while allowing to ‘observe’ people in a similar way as in direct participant observation studies. One noteworthy benefit of a diary study is its contemporaneous nature. Events, feelings, experiences, and thoughts can be recorded in a timely manner.
In my opinion, diary studies are an ideal method to research psychotherapy groups, because there’re several similarities between writing a diary and writing session notes. The therapist talks, for example, about the activity undertaken (therapy), the information being sought (making sense of group dynamics), and the activities that were undertaken to achieve this (interpretations, discussions in supervision, reading theoretical articles about interpretation). These are all features of diary studies and you could study your notes with this method. You probably wonder how you’d carry out a diary study.
Well, several decisions must be made about its design. First, you have to decide which format to use. Do you prefer hand-written notes or would you rather rely on an electronic version? Are you interested in an unstructured diary, meaning that it consists of narratives that diarists can just write as they please? Or would you like to use fixed categories? If that’s the case, you’d have to devise categories. How many pages should the diary be? Remember that a diary should be easy to use and not take up too much time to write.
What is the timing of entries? Simultaneously, CBT therapists write entries during the session, or immediately afterwards, which is more in line with Group Analysis? Choose a format that can best answer your research question.
Additionally, you need to decide whether you want to base your study on exploratory or predictive empiricism. Constructionism or positivism in other words. Session notes could serve both exploratory and predictive purposes.
Causality can be inferred with diary studies. Consider a group member, who has consistently arrived late for the past two months. Always seven minutes, to be precise. You could design a predictive diary study. Your prediction is that this person will also be seven minutes late in future. In positivist terminology, you aim to establish that the variable X (arrival time for the group), which you have measured over a period of two months by keeping an accurate record of his appearance in the group, predicts variable Y (lateness of exactly seven minutes).
Depending on your design, you’ve three options how to do your data analyses: if you combine a quantitative and qualitative approach (mixed-method design), you’d analyse your data both quantitatively and qualitatively. This could entail devising categories of group analytic concepts which you’ll have to code. For example, whether resonance, mirroring, or scapegoating happened. You could divide these into two categories ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. Of course, you could create a further dimensional scale that measures how often they occurred, from 1 to 3, where ‘1 is never’, ‘2 is sometimes’ and ‘3 is very often’. In addition, you could ask diarists to provide free floating narratives about their experience of resonant relationships in the group. Bear in mind that too many pre-coded categories counteract the depth and richness that is inherent in diaries, which you get from the narrative.
If you use a quantitative design, like the predictive causal one I described above, you analyse your data by using statistics. They don’t have to be complex. Descriptive stats, which calculate means, medians, or modes, are easily obtained and can be informative.
If you prefer a qualitative design and are only interested in the diarists lived experience of resonance, you analyse the content of the diary by using other qualitative data analysis methods. Basically, you could employ most methods that can analyse texts, because a written diary consists of text. Thematic Analysis, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, or Phenomenological Analysis have been applied to diverse topics and could be suitable for a qualitative diary study.
Whatever design you choose, it’s often necessary to do a pilot study with one diarist. You can ‘trial’ all your categories and questions that you’d like diarists to answer. Obviously, the pilot is done prior to the actual diary study, even though you could include this data in your analysis unless it’s flawed. A pilot enables you to correct design problems. You can also feel more confident that you’ll ask the right, correctly phrased, questions.
Let’s look at some possibilities so that you get a sense of how to do this in practice. You could use your own session notes and regard them as diary entries. They provide you with both qualitative and quantitative data. I assume that you’ve
included the dates of your sessions
names of your group members
when you wrote the notes
how much time has elapsed since you have written your first entry and how much time has passed between the sessions you’ve recorded
what activities you’ve undertaken (e.g. discussed boundary incident in supervision group)
information you’ve sought (e.g. read Foulkes’ papers on boundaries)
whether you need further information (if yes, you could read other group analytic literature on boundaries)
what you’ve done (e.g. encouraged free floating discussion about boundaries in the group; discussed boundary incident with a colleague after the session)
did any other action occur (e.g. reminded group members that they had agreed to refrain from contact outside the group).
Furthermore, you could identify feelings, such as anger to examine your countertransference. You could rate your ‘anger’ on a Likert-scale from 1 (“I experienced no anger”) to 5 (“I was extremely angry”).
Since diary studies do not always have to involve people, you could include documents.
Any document that you might have used (NICE guidance)
when you accessed it (Monday)
time taken to read it (15 minutes)
which aspects of this guidance were useful (clinical recommendation regarding the amount of sessions)
did you find all the information you needed, if not, did you look for other documents (Yes, IGA website).
Because your sessions note can be used for both quantitative and qualitative analysis, let’s assume that you’d like to do a mixed-method diary study. You could use notes (entries) from fifty group sessions. You’ve jotted down the attendance rates of your eight group members. ‘Missed’ and ‘Attended’ sessions could be counted, and you could report the mean(averages) of group members’ attendance. This might give you an indication about working alliance and group cohesion.
Furthermore, you could give each activity you engaged in a number (reading Foulkes 1; reading NICE guidance 2; discussion of boundary violations with colleague 3; discussion of resonance in supervision 4). This would enable you to count what you did by using numeric codes (1, 2, 3 etc.). You’d get an idea of how frequently you engaged in those activities. If you record the length of time you’ve spent on reading or on discussions in supervision, you’d know the exactproportion of time you engaged in reading. You could find out whether you don’t read enough or too much. Of course, these are only a few suggestions, many other aspects can be studied.
Descriptions of group dynamics lend themselves to be analysed qualitatively. Thematic Analysis would be suitable to identify who had a valency for which dynamic. For example, you notice that aggression occurred frequently in your group, because you’ve calculated frequencies. You could look for common themes as part of your analyses. Say that each time group members talked about childhood physical abuse, verbal aggression followed. Childhood sexual abuse would be a theme. Verbal aggression another theme. These two themes are linked. Once you’ve identified this, it’s no longer your subjective impression that they are connected, but an empirical finding. Of course, you’d have to carry out a predictive study to establish causality. Nevertheless, you could say that there’s an association between sexual abuse and verbal aggression. Exploring in supervision what you could do to prevent the same dynamic from happening again and again, would obviously be very useful. It’s a pity that diary studies have not been employed in Group Analysis, because they have so many other advantages. Benefits include fostering openness. Often, people find it easier to express intimate information in a diary than in a research interview. When researching sensitive topics, individuals might also be more forthcoming with genuine information in a diary. Because data is collected in a less intrusive manner compared to personal interviews. Moreover, diaries can be used creatively, giving an individual both voice and space to think about what they want to express. They’re easily accessible and do not require technology. The depth of information that can be gathered about a phenomenon of interest is a huge advantage of diary studies, in addition to inspiring participants to observe and reflect. So, diary studies could provide rich, meaningful data about groups. They might reveal surprising content, insight, and new information. Certain dynamics or a behaviour may occur more often then you’ve realised. That’s why I suggest that studying diaries could be a valuable method.
Of course, diary studies also have weaknesses. There’s the memory issue. Hence, if you’d like to research dynamics in your therapy group, do write you diary (entries) immediately after the group. The more time passes, the least accurate content will be. Retrospective recall tends to be inaccurate, which means that your results can’t be treated as definitive evidence. You can’t make claims about your findings being ‘true’, which is an epistemological matter. Adopting a social constructionist perspective allows you to feel more confident about your findings, because it’s not based on positivist assumptions, e.g. that we can discover ‘the truth’. Instead, social constructionism views everything, including truth, as socially constructed. But you’d have to stick to a qualitative design and couldn’t do a causal, predictive diary study.
Keeping a diary is time-consuming. To be useful as a research method, the diary must be kept for long enough to capture all events (or behaviour) of interest. This may be experienced as tedious by the writer. Obviously, if Thematic Analysis is used to make sense of your qualitative data, you must have knowledge of this method. So if you’re an inexperienced researcher, you’d need to acquire knowledge and ‘knowhow’.
My focus so far has been on therapy groups. If you supervise, you could ask the supervisees in your group to write about their reflections on the supervision group in a particular diary format. Then you could analyse individual diaries and additionally compare them. You’d need to explain exactly how the diary should be kept. Events must be recorded chronologically. For a diary to be useful, its writer must also be motivated, cooperative, and meticulous. Otherwise, your findings will be of limited value. If you ask your supervisees to write about their feelings and they record behaviour, then you’ll end up with no data. Moreover, when they record primarily activity data, you’ll get to know very little about their feelings.
There’s also the issue of your study participants writing truthfully. Narratives should be genuine. You don’t want supervisees to write what they think you’d like to hear (read). Finally, you must bear in mind that the diary method itself can impact on writers’ reflections and experiences. Be this as it may, diaries can generate stimulating processes.
To the best of my knowledge, no diary studies like the ones I’ve suggested exist in group analysis. Why not try out this method?
But don’t underestimate the complexity. Even though its use seems deceptively simple, you must familiarise yourself with the diary and other methods in order to produce valuable findings. Obtaining reliable data is always challenging when carrying out research. Diary studies may overcome some obstacles associated with gathering trustworthy data.
Reading:
Alaszewski A (2006) Using diaries for social research. London: Sage.