A person writing in a diaryOur new book, Qualitative Diary Methods, recently published by SAGE, grew out of years of working with – and trying to make sense of – qualitative diary methods (QDMs) in both our research and teaching.
For Laura, it started many years ago during her master’s dissertation and subsequent PhD in organisational psychology. She wanted to understand the texture of everyday working life, but struggled to find a method that could capture experiences as they unfolded. A single book chapter – Professor Gillian Symon’s “Uses of diaries in research” – sparked something. From then on, QDMs became a methodological home. Years later, at the University of Liverpool, we met and immediately clicked over our mutual enthusiasm for QDMs. We quickly moved from conversation to collaboration: co-developing app-based diary studies, experimenting with new forms of QDM analysis, and eventually, co-delivering workshops.
And that’s where NCRM enters the story.
Developing an NCRM workshop
We’d both found QDMs incredibly powerful in our own research, but frustratingly under-discussed in formal methods training. So, we developed a full-day NCRM workshop aimed at making QDMs more accessible – covering design, ethics, participant engagement and creative formats like audio, video and app-based diaries, alongside methods for analysing QDM data. These workshops were energising, not just in terms of the teaching, but for the conversations they sparked. Researchers brought with them fascinating QDM studies spanning health, work, education and more.
We refined the workshop year after year. We kept adapting the workshop each year – adding examples, refining our exercises, deepening the analytical tools and soon it became clear we needed more space than even a full day could allow. At a certain point, we realised we had more than a workshop. We had a book.
Helping researchers create capture temporally rich, participant-led data
The result is a practical, research-informed guide to QDMs: covering everything from research design and ethics to QDM specific analysis techniques – including our own approaches – event diagram analysis (EDA) and thematic trajectory analysis (TTA), developed through the challenges we faced in trying to make existing analytical approaches fit QDM data, and trialled with researchers across disciplines with the support of Methods North West and NCRM. The book also includes examples of written, photo, video, audio and app-based diaries, plus end-of-chapter exercises to support teaching and self-study.
We aimed to create the resource we wished we’d had when we first began our QDM journey. One that describes the wide variety of ways in which QDMs can be employed to help researchers capture temporally rich, participant-led data – and explore complex, situated questions in new ways.
We’re deeply grateful to NCRM for supporting this journey, and we hope the book offers something useful to the research community – whether you’re designing a new project, teaching methods, or simply curious about what QDMs can offer.