Mobile Diary Methods in Studying Daily Family Life

Overview

Although a newcomer in the field of family research, the history the mobile diary method is rooted in the wider context of the development of methods for investigating daily life. While the diary method has a far longer history in other disciplines (see Wilhelm & Perrez, 2013), it is nevertheless several decades since one of the first family research studies to utilize diaries was published by Thomas Wills, Robert Weiss, and Gerald Patterson (1974). These researchers asked seven married couples to monitor their marital behaviors and time use for a period of 14 days and to report back to the researchers in two daily landline phone calls. Since then, the use of the diary method in family research has grown. Pioneering experts in the history of diary methods in family research include professor Rena Repetti from the University of California, professor Reed Larson from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and professor David Almeida, the Pennsylvania State University. At the end of the 20^th century Larson and Almeida (1999) proposed the emotional transmission paradigm for understanding daily paths of emotional interchange in the family context. On the methodological level, studies using this paradigm often rely on diaries.

During the last two decades, diary methods have been intensively developed (see reviews by Bolger, Davis, & Rafaeli, 2003; Christensen, Barrett, Bliss-Moreau, Lebo, & Kaschub, 2003; Scollon, Kim-Pieto, & Diener, 2003). In particular, various new technologies have become increasingly utilized in diary studies, with different forms of electronic diaries complementing traditional paper-and-pencil diaries (Intille, 2012). The devices used in electronic diaries have become smaller and smarter; palmtops and pagers have gradually been replaced by mobile phones and smartphones. At the same time as the possibilities of mobile diary methods have been noticed in the field of family research, they have also been realized in several other areas of research, such as in measuring mood (Courvoisier, Eid, Lischetzke, & Schreiber, 2010) and in alcohol research (Kuntsche & Robert, 2009). Current leading scholars in diary research in the field of family studies include Jean-Philippe Laurenceau, University of Delaware, and Niall Bolger, Columbia University, as well as Meinrad Perrez and Dominic Schöbi, the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, whose work is discussed later in the text.