ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with two principal issues. The first is the issue of time in relation to diaries: how short is too short to keep a diary? And what counts as ‘short’? The second addresses the notion of sampling, which in diary research refers to the selection of timings for participants to record diary entries. This chapter is based on a project entitled ‘In Two Places at Once’, which set out to understand more about how academics with caring responsibilities manage attending and participating in conferences, following a previous study that uncovered some of these issues. The study employed an adapted form of diary-interview method, using the diary to capture the minutiae of academic-carers’ experiences of attending conferences, and the interview to compare the ‘case’ conference to other conference experiences. Overall the chapter argues that diary method yields a great degree of flexibility in terms of its adaptability to phenomena of different durations, but that there are particular considerations for short-term diary studies relating to the duration of the diary versus duration of the phenomenon, and to the functioning of the sampling strategy within a short, intense experience.
