![]() The fact that they could send us a picture to illustrate their point, made their story much more vivid to us. A few participants sent back really long paragraphs of text and described their experiences in much detail. The digital diary also gave us more than we expected. We knew what to focus on in the precious two-hour face to face time we shared with the participant. We scanned the physical diary before going into the interview, so we had a general idea of what angle each participant might take on our questions. It helped to warm up the participants for an in-depth discussion on a topic that not many people discuss openly on daily basis. Its guiding questions followed a similar outline to our interview discussion guide. The physical diary proved to be a great help to prepare both us, the researchers, and the participants for the in-depth interview. The physical diary was packed and posted in the first week to arrive at the participant’s home before the start of the second week. The titles were carefully phrased, to help the participant to capture what’s relevant to the core of our research questions. The Moment Frames were paper frames with a title underneath, asking the participant to capture three things from their daily life. We added prompts that we called ‘Moment Frames’, to put a focus on the most important object or environment in their story. All were open questions, asking for thoughts and feelings rather than facts. The diary booklet was designed with themes and questions to guide the responses. For example, imagine jolting down a few thoughts with a pencil in a small booklet before going to sleep. The entries in the physical diary were more reflective, as people often took more time to complete and reflect. The physical diary and the prompts made up for what the digital diary was missing and brought an element of fun to the study. That is why during the second research week we also used a physical diary accompanied by a few live prompts. We receive disparate slices of everyday life, and it’s up to the participants to frame the relationship between what they have captured and shared. This also offers a problem for the research team, because what comes back from such a digital diary is often fragmented. The study was focused on exploring day-to-day routines, so specific details to illustrate their recurring journeys were meaningful to capture and share. For example: a place, an object, a scenario. We asked the participants to keep this diary with a daily entry of two weeks, mostly for things that were visible to capture. The diary could be installed as an app on the participants’ smartphones, and they could enter text, images, videos, and locations for each diary entry. The original plan aimed to use a digital diary tool to capture relevant moments in a participant’s life for two weeks. The digital and physical dairies were complementary to each other, and also to the other research touch points with the participants. Looking back, the use of both of these seemed to be very beneficial for the research project. As key tools for the diary study, we used both a digital and a physical diary. Thus when they met us in person for the interview, they had already given some thought to some of the questions raised. We aimed to keep the diary study conversational in order to encourage and stimulate the reflective thinking process of the participants. As the study explored experiences and reflections on personal topics such as sleep, stress and wellbeing, the participants benefitted from a slow lead up that triggered their observations and thoughts. The two-week diary study set the tone of the research project and acted as an introduction to the study for each participant. ![]() The rationale for this blended research method was to use the diary study to warm up participants to the research topic, followed by a two-hour deep dive interview at their home, and culminating in a creative group session where the participants could jointly contribute to future-oriented speculations. Recently we carried out a study with a mix of three of the most used and recognised qualitative methods: a diary study, in-depth interviews, and co-creation workshops.
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