Daily Diary Methods

Unique Features of Diary Methods

In the area of close relationship research, diary methods are used to study various phenomena, such as rates and effects of supportive and hindering acts, associations between responsiveness and intimacy, sexual behaviors and motivations, emotional experiences and their transmission to others, and empathic accuracy. To illustrate the latter, couples might be asked to complete daily reports of their own mood along with inferences about their partners' moods; these reports are then cross-matched to determine general levels of inferential accuracy as well as individual and contextual differences in these.

The frequent reports obtained with diary studies enable monitoring particular feelings, cognitions, actions, or situations in the real-life contexts absent from traditional research designs. These fleeting states or events are monitored while or soon after

Gthey occur. This highlights the first generally accepted benefit of diary methods: They circumvent the need for retrospection or for reliance on respondents' beliefs about themselves or the world and instead capture transient states as they are lived and felt. The importance of this benefit has been made clear by work showing that when people attempt to report their feelings, the length of the period of time about which they are responding affects the way in which their response is generated. Reporting one's momentary mood can usually be done quite easily and with acceptable validity. However, when reporting their mood over, say, the past few days, individuals do not simply access their memories of these states but instead may rely on their chronic beliefs about their mood or temperament. Moreover, when respondents do try to aggregate subjective feelings over some time, they tend to overemphasize certain moments (e.g., the emotion felt while providing the rating) and as a result, supply less reliable or valid estimates than those obtained by actually monitoring feelings repeatedly. For example, in an uncomfortable medical procedure, patients' subsequent evaluation of pain in the procedure is most strongly related to peak levels of pain felt during the procedure and to the pain at the very end of it and not to a real aggregate of the pain or its duration.

When transitory states (such as positive or negative mood, thoughts of acceptance or rejection), behaviors (e.g., providing or seeking support), or events (e.g., interactions with an opposite-sex person) are monitored repeatedly within a diary study, researchers reap a second benefit: collecting [Page 374]information on the intra- and interpersonal context of these states. Because diaries are completed in the course of everyday life, they open a window to examining many important contextual effects on the variables of interest. For example, a health researcher may want to know whether situational features (e.g., presence of peers) distinguish moments in which a particular behavior (e.g., smoking) occurs. Similarly, a relationship re searcher may want to examine whether empathic accuracy increases when spouses are asked to intuit their partners' moods when apart (e.g., at work) or together (e.g., at home).

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