Using diaries in social research

Biographers, historians and literary scholars have long considered diary documents to be of major importance for telling history. More recently, sociologists have taken seriously the idea of using personal documents to construct pictures of social reality from the actors' perspective (see Plummer's 1983 book Documents of Life). In contrast to these 'journal' type of accounts, diaries are used as research instruments to collect detailed information about behaviour, events and other aspects of individuals' daily lives. Self-completion diaries have a number of advantages over other data collections methods. First, diaries can provide a reliable alternative to the traditional interview method for events that are difficult to recall accurately or that are easily forgotten. Second, like other self-completion methods, diaries can help to overcome the problems associated with collecting sensitive information by personal interview. Finally, they can be used to supplement interview data to provide a rich source of information on respondents' behaviour and experiences on a daily basis. The 'diary-diary interview method' where the diary keeping period is followed by an interview asking detailed questions about the diary entries is considered to be one of the most reliable methods of obtaining information. The following discussion is largely concerned with fairly 'structured' diaries, as opposed to free text diaries, and with those where events or behaviour are recorded as they occur ('tomorrow diaries', rather than 'yesterday' or retrospective diaries).