When Participants Do the Capturing - The Role of Media in Diary Studies

Summary

This paper examines how participant-captured media affect diary studies. Drawing on three studies using photographs, audio recordings, location information, and tangible objects, Carter and Mankoff find that media differ in how they support recall, interview flow, participant burden, and researcher preparation. Photos were easiest to recognize and supported specific recall, audio enabled capture of non-visual or clandestine events but could be hard to identify, location alone did not improve recall, and tangible objects tended to prompt broader discussion of attitudes and beliefs. The authors propose a hybrid diary-study pipeline combining lightweight in situ capture, brief annotation, later participant annotation, researcher review, and elicitation interviews, and present the Reporter tool to support this process.

Important Keywords

Diary studies: studies in which participants record events or experiences over time for later researcher analysis.
Participant-driven capture: letting participants collect media or records themselves during relevant moments.
Media elicitation: using captured media to prompt recall and discussion in later interviews.
Feedback studies: diary studies where captured material helps participants give feedback about experiences or systems.
Elicitation studies: studies where media are used primarily to elicit accounts, attitudes, and remembered details.
Photo elicitation: using photographs as prompts that are easy to recognize and support specific recall.
Audio annotation: capturing or labeling audio records, useful for nonvisual events but sometimes hard to identify later.
Tangible objects: physical items collected as prompts that often support broader discussion of attitudes and beliefs.
Episodic memory prompts: cues that help participants remember specific past events.
Situated annotation: adding notes close to the moment and context where an event occurs.
Reporter tool: the authors' tool for supporting lightweight capture, annotation, review, and elicitation in diary studies.
In-situ: in the actual context where the activity occurs.
Feedback study: diary format where participants answer predefined questions around events.
Elicitation study: diary format where participant-captured material is used later as an interview prompt.
Annotation: extra notes added in-situ or ex-situ to make captured media interpretable.
Longitudinal data: data collected across time rather than in one sitting.

Important Concepts

Diary study tradeoff: feedback studies provide more immediate and potentially accurate responses but can burden participants, while elicitation studies are less intrusive but depend on later recall.
Media-specific recall: photos best supported recognition of who and where; audio supported recall after recognition and enabled non-visual capture; tangible objects were weak for event reconstruction but useful for eliciting attitudes and beliefs.
Annotation need: ambiguous captures often required brief situated annotation, but written annotation in the field was too disruptive, making lightweight audio annotation valuable.
Interview preparation: researchers needed ways to review, categorize, annotate, and structure captured data before elicitation interviews, especially when discussions followed themes rather than capture order.
Proposed pipeline: the authors recommend lightweight capture, lightweight in situ annotation, later richer annotation, researcher review, and a post-study interview using captured media as prompts.
Diary studies collect longitudinal, in-situ qualitative data about users' activities, behaviours, experiences, feelings, and context; typical studies run from a few days to months, often 3-14 days.
The normal process is planning, briefing, pilot, diary logging, post-study interview, analysis, and reporting.
Feedback diary studies ask predefined questions at the moment of an event, which improves recall but can burden participants.
Elicitation diary studies ask participants to capture lightweight media that later prompts interviews; this is less intrusive but depends more on later recall.
Media choice matters: photos are easy and support recognition of who/where/what; audio is lightweight but harder to recognize later; tangible objects can elicit beliefs and attitudes; raw location data often needs annotation.
Messaging apps can support diary studies because they are familiar and multimedia-friendly, but they raise workload, privacy, platform, and GDPR issues.

Examples

In the everyday photo diary study, a participant used a picture of a colleague's beverage as a pointer to recall a discussion about an online article.
In the transit study, phone-based responses and GPS-derived location were used to study public transit decisions, but maps did not significantly aid recall.
In the festival study, flowers arranged from bright to dark represented a participant's views of Latin, cool, and traditional jazz.
In the festival study, participants used audio recorders to capture overheard conversations or other people's talk in situations where taking a photo would have felt intrusive.
In the Reporter pilot, participants uploaded photos and audio annotations, marked parts of photographs with colored rectangles, answered per-capture questions, and later responded to researcher follow-up questions.