‘Please write about what it is meaningful to you’
The diary instructions were simple and broad, leaving space for the participants who volunteered to ‘record activities and events in their
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words’ (Corti, 1993:2) that were meaningful to them. The following images show the diary instructions inside the handwritten diaries sent and the instructions sent to the participants that completed electronic diaries.
Instructions:
Please write one entry per day (minimum) for 7 days
Please write about whatever is relevant and meaningful to you when thinking about your day-to-day life.
Please use a pen (any colour) but not a pencil.
The length of each diary entry is up to you.
Please begin each entry with the day of the week or date.
Please feel free to be as open as possible and please.
Don’t worry about spelling and grammar.
Don’t hesitate to contact me if you need guidance or have questions Devina +44 (UK) xxxxxxxxx
Figure 3. Images, and details of the instructions inside the front cover of the handwritten diaries
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‘What to include in your diary:
Please type one diary entry per day (minimum) for 7 days using your computer.
This is your diary, so please write about whatever is relevant and meaningful to you when thinking about your day-to-day life.
You can do more than one diary entry per day if you want to.
When typing your diary you can use any font size, colour and type of font that you like.
The length of each diary entry is up to you. You could try to do at least half a page per diary entry, or just write as much as you can in the time you have available
It would really help me if you could please type the date or the day of the week at the beginning of each diary entry. If you would not mind doing so please could you also introduce people you talk about when you first mention them: (for example) Georgie, my grandpa.
Please feel free to be as open as possible. I am so interested in looking at the meanings you attach to your experiences.
If you want to talk more about what to talk about when recording your video diary please do feel free to contact me. I’ll call during the week to check things are going ok.
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I hope you don’t mind but I was planning to send you a daily reminder asking you to please do each entry. This will just be a short text or email reminder.
What to do once you’ve finished your diary:
Once you have completed your diary, please save it on the USB stick I sent you. Please also let me know you have finished and we will arrange for a courier to pick up your USB stick.
I will not be returning the USB stick to you so if you would like to keep your diary please save a copy of it somewhere secure on your computer. The version that I will use in the research will have any personal information removed or changed.
If you change your mind about being involved in this research, please do let me know as soon as you can. I can take your diary out of the research up until 15th November 2015. After this date I will have started the research data analysis. Any questions please do not hesitate to get in touch!’
Figure 4. Image of the password-protected USB used to save the electronic diaries, and details of the instructions sent with this.
The aims of the instruction sheets was to avoid putting words and ideas
‘into’ the women’s heads, keeping instructions short and concise, and also a reminder that we had agreed I would send reminders, since diaries can be easily forgotten amongst other daily activities (‘I was
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planning to send you a daily reminder asking you to please do each entry. This will just be a short text or email reminder.’) As it is possible to see from the electronic diary instructions (and in Appendix E for the full handwritten instructions), I agreed with each participant that their diary would be picked using a courier or a stamped and addressed envelope. For the women based abroad a courier was organised, whereas the UK-based participants were sent a stamped and addressed envelope with a forwarding address for the University written on it. My reasoning behind these protocols was to ensure the women did not have to incur any costs from participating, excluding having to go to a post-box or wait for a courier. Thankfully we did not have any trouble organising this, and the seven participants were all kind enough to send the diaries promptly when they were completed.
Summary
In this chapter I have provided a dialogue about the value of using diary methods in research, more readily focussing on the solicited diary that was produced specifically for the purposes of research. There are advantages and limitations to different diary methods, and ethical issues that unfolded, as I have discussed in this chapter and will continue to do so during the remainder of the thesis. In the next chapter there will be information provided about the women who volunteered to be part of the research, dedicating their time and energy to constructed detailed narratives about their lives.
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Chapter 5: Strategies used to gather story data, and about the participants
Feminist standpoint theories (Harding, 1991) emphasised the importance of providing women with spaces to tell stories about their lives from their unique and socially situated knowledge of the world.
Feminists engaging in research, or feminist researchers (Miller et al., 2012), in this way take seriously women’s diverse experiences, and also situating women as having different backgrounds, skills, abilities and preferences. I have detailed in the previous chapter the diary methods used, and some ethical constraints of using narrative and diary methods. In this chapter I give an account of the process of data collection, as well as a representation of the women living with IBS that took part in the PhD diary study, is discussed.