Diary Designs as a Compassionate Research Design

Abstract

This essay explores the ethical underpinnings and utility of diary designs as a component of a triangulated research strategy that challenges positivist approaches to research. Building upon the work of Critical, Feminist, and Indigenous researchers, we show how centering marginalized voices through storytelling and diary designs allows for the examination of short-term, nuanced processes and everyday experiences of diverse individuals. Using original data collected at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we leverage diary research to explore emotional labor among local public sector employees to better understand how the method itself might reduce power imbalances with researchers, improve the quality of data, and support the well-being of participants. We found diaries led participants to pay heightened attention to their internal states and behavior, increasing their baseline levels of self-monitoring and in some cases altering the ways they coped with emotional exhaustion. Diaries centered the voices of participants by giving them repeated opportunities to provide frequent reports on the social and psychological particulars of ongoing events and experiences in the context of their daily lives. We use these findings to suggest a path forward for more compassionate, liberatory, and empathic research designs that blend methodologies to center the experiences of participants while being cognizant of the ethical impacts engaging in research can have on their lives.