Diary Studies 101: How to Conduct an Effective Diary Study

If you’re looking to learn how consumers interact with your product in their natural environment, diary studies are an extremely effective way to gain rich, in-context, qualitative insights. 

Originally conducted with just notebooks and pens, breakthroughs in technology have made it vastly easier to conduct diary studies at scale. And with that increased scalability, they’ve become an even more powerful tool for real-time insights on people’s everyday lives. 

Looking to learn more about diary studies and how you can effectively implement them in your own research efforts? We’ve got you covered from planning your project all the way to analysis. 

What is a Diary Study? 

A diary study is a qualitative research methodology that is used to capture consumer behaviors, activities, and experiences over time. 

During a diary study, participants are asked to document their experiences, whether in written form or through other media like photos, videos, and audio recordings. Depending on the research objective, these longitudinal studies can span from as little as a few days to weeks or even months—offering an authentic look into people’s everyday lives. 

Why Conduct a Diary Study? 

1. Reveal trends over time: If you ask someone how they feel in a survey question or interview, their responses only provide a snapshot of a single moment in time. The longitudinal nature of diary studies means you’re able to see how consumer behaviors and perceptions evolve over time, revealing trends or opportunities.  
2. Understand real-world experiences: Diary studies are self-moderated by participants in their natural environments. This helps you get a deeper understanding of their day-to-day lives, observe external factors that are impacting their experience, and increase consumer empathy. 
3. Reach a broader audience: Traditional field studies can be expensive or logistically challenging to scale. With today’s research technology, diary studies enable you to reach a broader array of demographics or geographies and efficiently gather data from multiple participants at the same time. 

When to Use a Diary Study 

Diary studies are an extremely effective way to understand consumers’ true motivations, needs, and pain points—which means they have a broad range of applications! But diary studies are most commonly used to uncover whitespace opportunities, learn about category behaviors, and dig into the consumer experience.  

If you find yourself asking one of these questions, you might want to consider using a diary study:  

• What does our target consumer’s day actually look like? 

• Where, when, and why do they look for our product? 

• How does our product make them feel? 

• Are they experiencing any unexpected challenges? What about moments of delight? 

Designing Your Diary Study 

It’s trite but it’s true. Before you begin your diary study research, you need to define your research objective. The focus of your diary study could be something broad, like understanding how people prepare a weeknight dinner, or something more specific, like when they use an app to get food delivered.  

The length of your study will vary depending on the nature of that focus. For a commonplace behavior like preparing dinner, you may need just days or a week. For something more infrequent like a delivery order, you might want weeks to months to capture a large enough sample of the target behavior.  

The number of participants for a diary study can range from as little as five to as many as 30. As with study length, the right number of participants will depend on the nature of your research question and the diversity within your consumer group. The larger the research question and greater the diversity, the higher number of participants you’ll want to include. 

You should also consider how often participants will be asked to log in their diaries. Is it based on a specific event (upon product usage/consumption) or a specific time interval (every Sunday)? 

Of course, much of this will depend on what’s possible with your diary study tools. QualSights offers the world’s most authentic diary studies by combining first-of-its-kind Smart Sensors with our award-winning Participant App and AI-powered Client Platform. How does it work? 

Our revolutionary Smart Sensors passively record product usage, eliminating doubts about data accuracy. Meanwhile, the Participant App offers a variety of self-moderated and live activities—such as video, photo, audio, surveys, screen captures, and more—that can be scheduled or triggered in real time based on target behaviors. Together, the Smart Sensors and Participant App help you understand the why behind consumer behaviors and overcome the say-do gap. 

Recruiting and Monitoring Participants 

Once you know who you’re looking for, you need to find them. But it’s not so easy!  

While a well-written screener can effectively uncover the most interactive of participants, the fact of the matter is that diary studies are more involved than some other methodologies. And because you’re asking participants to share insights over a period of days, weeks, or months rather than one sitting, you need to keep them engaged.  

That starts with clear communication. Once participants agree to take part in your study, they should go through a formal onboarding process in which they’re given clear instructions on what to do. This means walking them through the project’s timeline, their expected logging schedule, the tools they’ll be using, and expectations from a quality perspective.  

And the communication doesn’t stop once the project is underway. Issue gentle reminders for those who haven’t completed tasks or offer feedback to encourage better responses. Be there to help if they experience any challenges along the way. It should go without saying, but the more valued participants feel, the higher quality insights you’ll obtain.   

Of course, compensation is a key part of the value equation, too. Participating in a diary study requires time and effort, so you should consider offering higher incentives than less involved methods. Be sure to remind participants about incentives as the project is ongoing and even consider offering installments or bonuses as extra motivation. 

Analyzing Diary Data 

What analysis looks like will depend on your tools. If your diaries are recorded in a tool without transcriptions, you’ll have to transcribe them before analyzing in spreadsheets or other software.   

Regardless of your tools, you want to revisit your original research questions and consider: 

• How did participants’ behaviors change over time? 

• What influenced their behaviors or decisions? 

• What similarities and differences are you seeing? 

When you conduct Smart Diaries with QualSights, our client platform provides you with a host of industry-leading tools to get to the bottom of your business questions: 

• Gen AI Summarization, which automatically generates clear, concise summaries from all sessions, no matter how many participants or tasks are involved.  

• Gen AI Theme Generation, which intelligently identifies trends and patterns within sessions and tasks/questions, surfacing relevant keywords and recurring themes. 

• Automatic transcriptions, translations, sentiment for all sessions 

• Unrivalled storytelling with our drag-and-drop presentation builder, automatic video clipping for easy reel creation, and charts/graphs from dashboards 

• Seamless integration of all qual, quant, and sensor data  

Conclusion 

With advances in modern research technology, diary studies have become an even more powerful tool for researchers to get to the heart of consumers’ day-to-day experiences.  

If you’re looking to understand your audience’s true motivations, needs, and pain points, contact us today to get started on your next diary study.