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entire diary/log and then ask them if there
was anything that they found confusing or
unclear. Pretest the diary/log with everyone
as planned before you make any changes.
Revise the diary/log. Revise questions that
people found confusing during the pretest.
If a question was confusing only to one
person, use your judgment to decide
whether to change the question. Ask
yourself whether there is something you can
easily fix that would have helped that one
person understand the question (e.g.,
providing an example). If so, you may be
able to make a simple change or addition to
clarify the question. Also consider whether
this respondent found many of the questions
confusing while other respondents had no
problem with them. If this is the case, you
may not want to make changes. You will
have to decide on a case-by-case basis.
If you make substantial changes to the
diary/log, you should conduct another
pretest before finalizing the form.
Collect Data
Produce diaries/logs in sufficient quantities
so that respondents have several extra
forms in case they make errors or need
more space. Deliver the diaries/logs to
respondents, along with detailed written
instructions, prior to training (if applicable)
or at least 1 week before the study begins.
If you are asking program participants rather
than program staff to complete diaries/logs
for you, you will have to distribute the
materials on site. Give respondents a fixed
time frame to complete the diaries/logs and
provide them with a means (envelope/postage)
to return the data to you. If your study is
longer than a week or two, you may want to
ask respondents to ship the first week of
data to you so that you can review the logs
for accuracy and completeness and even
begin to tally some of the information.
Analyze Results
In the planning phase, you determined what
you wanted to learn from the study. Now you
will have the chance to look through the
diaries/logs to answer these questions.
Diaries generally contain qualitative
information (e.g., how food choices were
made that day, evaluation of programs
completed). Activity logs may contain
several types of information—quantitative
information you can tabulate easily (e.g.,
how many people called a hotline each day,
whether people picked up a brochure) as
well as qualitative information (e.g., reasons
that students liked or participated in
an activity).
Analyzing qualitative responses. The best
way to analyze qualitative information is to
read through the information, searching for
similarities and differences between diaries.
You will need to consider all of the questions
that you determined were important in the
planning phase. Once you have reviewed
several diaries, you should be able to pull
out general themes or patterns from the
information. The best way to analyze these
themes is to develop categories for the
responses. For example, if you want to know
why teachers thought their students liked or
disliked a certain educational module in your
program, you might group responses into
categories such as “challenging,” “fun,” “too
much work,” “boring.” Continue reading
through the remaining diaries and see how
many responses fall into these categories.
As you go along, you may come up with
additional categories or decide to collapse
several categories together. You can
certainly make inferences (e.g., “Teachers
liked the module because…”) about diary
information, but resist the temptation to
quantify this information.
156 Communication Research Methods