Naturalistic Methods

Diaries

[Page 1480]Diary designs involve repeated completion of short surveys in one’s natural environment. By asking participants to describe experiences close in time to when they spontaneously occur, diary methods reduce the likelihood of recall error and allow generalizability to the real-world settings. As advancements in computing and mobile technology have rendered electronic survey administration ever more feasible, researchers are increasingly turning to diary designs to study a wide range of developmental processes across the life span.

Given the rapid pace of development across infancy, researchers have used parent-report diaries, completed on a daily basis across several weeks or administered several days out of every month, to document short-term developmental changes in everyday behaviors such as infant crying. Similar designs have been used to study how caretakers’ own behaviors and cognitions change as they navigate the first weeks or months of parenthood, and whether such changes differ across families, depending on more stable characteristics such as childrearing attitudes or infant temperament.

Many diary studies use a predictable sampling schedule in which participants complete surveys on one or more predetermined occasions each day (e.g., in the evening before bed), describing events and experiences that have taken place since the previous report. In contrast to these interval-contingent methods, other diary designs utilize event-contingent sampling, in which a diary is completed every time an event or behavior meeting a specified definition has occurred. For example, event-contingent diaries have been used to study the contexts and characteristics of separation anxiety by asking mothers to complete a short survey following each separation with their young child across several days or weeks. Event-contingent diaries are particularly useful when the event or behavior of interest is well defined and occurs on a relatively infrequent or irregular basis. For instance, parents may be asked to describe their own feelings and behaviors as well as the perceived reactions of their children, following each incident of interparental conflict or disagreement across several days or weeks.

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