Overview
Diary keeping can help to build personal, contextual understanding about work processes and experiences over time: tracking trends, detailing significant events, and recording experience
Purpose
- Build up an honest picture of a work environment, from a workers' perspective, that might challenge management accounts or public perception.
- Gather evidence of events and incidents.
- Document working conditions, workplace interactions and power relations.
- Record thoughts, feelings, and reactions in the moment.
Advantages
Many people, even within the same workplace, do not fully understand other people’s work. The power of diary keeping often comes from groups of workers comparing their accounts:
- exploring the similarities and differences between them;
- exposing underlying patterns (such as management strategies) which impact them all, though maybe in different ways.
Diary keeping is also useful for reflection, where the author(s) may realise new things through writing or rereading. These could be things like:
- how many hours they have worked without pay;
- deeper insights into the ways that structural inequalities are reproduced in the workplace and beyond.
In Practice
Diaries don’t have to be conventional one-entry-per-day accounts. They can take different forms and diarists need to decide on what will work best in their context.
- Structure: Will the diaries cover specific events (episodic), particular topics (thematic), or day-to-day occurences (regular)?
- Focus: Should entries look to convey a 'day-in-the-life' of workers, their interpersonal interactions, or specify the details of workplace activities and tasks?
- Medium: Will the diaries be written, video-recorded, photo-based or expressed through 'found objects'? (See Visual Research.)
- Audience: Who are the diaries for? People outside the workplace, other workers inside it, or another group of diarists?
Many of these methods are also useful in combination with other approaches such as Visual Research or Interviews.
15–30 minutes per day
Camera or smartphone, text-editing software, notebook
1+ people
60–120 minutes
Pen and paper
1+ people
60–120 minutes
Spreadsheet, paper and pen
1+ people
Further Reading
Keeping diaries is an established method in workplace sociology more generally and has been used as part of workers’ inquiries. There is also a long tradition of diary keeping in social anthropology and ethnography. This has often involved ‘outsider researchers’ (although not always). There are lots of examples and approaches to draw from.
A good short paper on young workers which discusses the practicalities and limitations of these approaches:
Bolton, A, Pole, C. and Mizen, C. (2001) Picture this: Researching Child Workers Sociology 35(2): 501-518. doi:10.1177/S0038038501000244. Online at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/48688.pdf
A good example of evidence gathering this is in relation to workplace safety and accidents, where the qualitative accounts of those involved may offer different insights to those gathered from structured ‘accident forms’ and collated by management:
Pickup, S, Paton, K., Hayes, C. and Morrison, B. (2020) A day in the life of frontline manufacturing personnel: A diary-based safety study. Health and Safety Science, 132. ISSN 0925-7535. doi: 10.1016/j.ssci.2020.104992.