User:Catelongino/Diary studies

When to Use Diary Studies
Diary studies are most often used when observing behavior over time in a natural environment. They can be beneficial when one is looking to find new qualitative and quantitative data.

Temporal Processes in Diary Studies
Further advantages of diary studies include their ability to not only track daily events in the moment, but also over time. Researchers have begun conducting studies that allow them to explore the connection between a previous day's events and a current day's outcome, or how much prior events make people responsive to current events. Researchers Robert E. Wickham and C. Raymond Knee have concluded that future research studies would benefit from evaluating temporal processes, or processes related to time, in diary studies. This would serve as a way for researchers to test unique questions and hypotheses.

Using Diary Studies to Evaluate Within-Person Change
Researchers have made strides to use diary studies to evaluate how people can change over time within. Traditional diary studies have evaluated change between individuals, but new studies have been conducted to evaluate within-person changes using diary studies. Through a framework of the Generalizability Theory, researchers have used a condensed version of the Profile of Mood States to study within-person emotional changes via diaries. They used two data sets, one which consisted of 35 daily reports from 68 individuals, and one which contained daily reports from 164 people over a 28 day period.

Notable Diary Studies
In 2015, a diary study was conducted at a Dutch University of Applied Sciences to evaluate how learning spaces affect students' learning activities. 52 business management students kept records of the learning activities that they worked on, where they worked on them, and why they worked there for a week. Through evaluating the diary entries of this study, researchers found a significant correlation between the spaces in which students chose to work and their learning activities.