Research Diaries and Journals

Research diaries are documents written by individuals to keep a record of ongoing events in their lives and in their surrounding social environment. Andy Alaszewki argued that to constitute data for empirical research, diaries generally need to be contemporaneous, personal, and kept regularly and also must feature entries that include emotions, beliefs, interpretations, interactions, events, and activities. Different types of diaries exist. Logs contain records of activities and events, often in minute details, but feature no personal or intimate information. Journals are diaries written with a narrow audience in mind—the writer himself or herself. Memoirs are similar to journals in both content and form, but their intended audience encompasses both contemporaries of the author and posterity. The latter are often intended for publication and, therefore, may include artistic elements and fictional components. Distinctions between journals and memoirs are, however, difficult at times, and for that reason the words diaries and journals are used interchangeably in this entry.

Historically, research diaries and journals have developed as user-friendly technologies of recording have become more easily available. In today's society, diaries and journals have become somewhat omnipresent thanks to high levels of literacy; the cultural emphasis on self-disclosure, self-awareness, and introspection; and, of course, the ease of publicizing personal memoirs on new media of communication such as the internet (e.g., blogs, online diaries).

Qualitative researchers employ diaries and journals in two main fashions: as tools of data collection and as data. In other words, researchers may explicitly commission people to keep diaries and journals, or they may collect diaries and journals kept by people out of their volition. Regardless of their solicited or unsolicited origin, many different research strategies may employ diaries and journals. For example, they may be used as part of: fieldwork; unstructured, semi-structured, and structured interviewing; action research; evaluation research; textual analysis; and case study research. In addition, diary- and journal-derived data are amenable to interpretation from a wide variety of analytic perspectives.

Research diaries and journals have been used predominantly in biographical and historical research. Diaries and journals serve well the purpose of providing researchers with documentary evidence in the form of raw historical and biographical material because they are personal, situated, intimate, and capable of offering insight into the lives of marginalized oppressed people or groups otherwise neglected by traditional versions of objective political and cultural history. Diaries and journals are also commonly used in ethnographic research because they are known to offer vivid depictions of the flow of everyday life experiences and to work well as thickly descriptive chronicles rich with insights into taken-for-granted social interactions. Finally, research journals and diaries have been used to record mundane activities and experiences otherwise inaccessible by researchers. For example, diary entries solicited through structured open-ended survey questions have shed light on time management activities, division of household labor, frequency of sexual activity, and so forth. Similarly, researchers have used diaries and journals to benefit from the deeply reflexive nature of writing over time; compiling diaries allows individuals to ponder the meanings of routines, rituals, identity, and even sensory perceptions.

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