Diary studies
Rikard Harr
November 2010
Outline
• The Diary study: benefits, challenges and alternatives
• The papers: aims and use of diary study
– Short summaries
• Group task
© Rikard Harr 2010
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The Diary study
Benefits
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An approach for studying people on the move and in situ (all)
A method for understanding participant behavior that
minimizes the effect of observers (Carter and Mankoff, 2005)
Demands less resources than alternative methods (Carter and
Mankoff 2005)
Helps create empirical evidence
Helps develop trust, a suitable first method (Hess and Wulf,
2009)
© Rikard Harr 2010
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Alternatives for understanding
everyday human behavior
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Observations
Ethnographic approaches, video recorded
Contextual inquiries
Survey studies
Experience Sampling Method (ESM)
Probes
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Challenges
• How to find a balance between feedback studies and
media elicitation studies
– People answer/record questions/things as things happen
– People record events and are interviewed afterwards
• How to gather user entries in feedback studies
– Dial to a voice mail system
– Create audio recordings
– Creating written entries
• Which media to use in media elicitation studies
– Audio
– Photo
– Tangible objects
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The papers and Diary studies
• Czerwinski et al. (2004) make use of it for characterizing
how people interleave multiple tasks amidst interruptions
• Sohn et al. (2008) make use of it for understanding
mobile information needs and how they are addressed
• Hess and Wulf (2009) structures it and add camera and
pen (?)
• Carter and Mankoff (2005) explores the effect of using
different media to capture events and how this affect the
diary study method
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Applying the method: Czerwinski
• Aim, to characterize how people interleave multiple tasks
amidst interruptions
• Baseline survey
• Used diaries during a week
• Also captured users descriptions of their work
• 11 participants were used (3 female)
• All reported on participation in at least 3 projects
• Age from 25 to 50
• A spreadsheet for each day was created with columns: Time
of task start, difficulty switching to the task, what
documents were included in the task, what was forgotten if
anything, comments, and number of interruptions
experienced
• A code scheme had been developed
• Two experimenters coded the first day diaries
© Rikard Harr 2010
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Applying the method: Hess and Wulf
• Aim, to evaluate a structured media diary for capturing
participants’ social video consumption
• Date, Context, Event, Persons, Comment, Picture, Sticker
• Recruited participants via an article in the newspaper
• 9 households, 17 participants
• Short introduction before handing out ”the boxes”
• Age, between 10 and 45
• Range of study, 2-4 weeks
• Short semi-structured interview (10 minutes)
• Diaries were accepted very well
• 17 participants made 189 diary entries
• Strong differences in the level of detail in diaries
• Stickers were used in 15 cases
• Got photos from 6 out of 9 (1-6)
© Rikard Harr 2010
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Applying the method: Carter and Mankoff
• Aim: seek to understand how context information and
episodic memory prompts captured by participants vary
with media, in what way different media supports recall
and how different media affect the diary study process
• Wants to improve the technique, based on three studies
– Observed and interviewed researchers in two studies
– Conducted their own study
Results
• Audio elicitation suffers from recognition problems, but
encourage more discrete event capturing
• Tangible objects unravels users attitudes and beliefs
better, but are not good for remembering events
• Photos are easiest to capture and recognize
• For studies in which detail is important audio/photo is
preferable
© Rikard Harr 2010
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Applying the method: Carter and Mankoff
• Location information does not add much for recalling an
episode
• People are more keen on providing feedback answers if
there are fewer events
• To support recall it is good to tag a captured event with a
brief annotation
• Researchers should be able to review captured data as
well as annotations before the interview
• Automatic time-stamping is important in all cases
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Group task
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You want to study the disruptive effects of various forms of
interruptions for information workers. This in order to provide
implications for design of future ICT
You have no budget but some time over
You think that factors such as relation, location, situation matter
How would you designs such a diary study and why? Motivate your
decisions and prepare to present it
If you absolutely want to apply another approach or method, do so
and prepare to motivate why
If necessary make own assumptions about the object of study
© Rikard Harr 2010
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Applying the method: Sohn et al.
• Aim: To understand mobile information needs and how
they are addressed
• Two-week diary study
• 20 participants (10 – 10), aged 19-58
• Recruited through an online mail list and flyers
• Focused on type of information needs, methods to adress
those needs and contextual factors that prompted needs
• Kept diaries when mobile
• Conducted introductory, mid-study and final interview
with all
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Applying the method: Sohn et al.
• Provided several examples of what to record
• Used a text messaging scheme
• Messages were sent to an email address which posted
them on a website
• Text messages should be composed to support answering
a set of questions at the end of the day
• Researchers sent five reminding messages every day
• At the end of the day participants logged in and answered
six questions about their entries
• Applied a reward system
• 421 diary entries
• In interviews clarifications of unclear entries were made
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