The social-media-based diary: a promising research tool for the digital era?

• In Event: Digital tools in education: opportunities, gaps, and policies shaping learning in classrooms

Proposal

As society becomes increasingly digital, mobile, and 24/7-oriented, there is a growing demand for research methods that mirror participants' day-to-day experiences. This article reviews the successes and challenges of adopting solicited social-media-based diaries (SMBDs) to investigate the freshman experience at universities. We recruited 82 participants from a leading Chinese university to document their first-semester experiences (learning practices, daily interactions, psychological dynamics, etc.) for 17 weeks on WeChat Moments, a key function of WeChat—China’s most prevalent social media platform, where users share posts and interact with friends. Pre- and Post-diary, one-on-one interviews were conducted with participants to explore their perceptions, behaviors, and feelings about documenting their lives and providing research data through SMBDs. By integrating the interview data with our observations during the research process, we identified opportunities for using SMBDs in research and how they can address many limitations of traditional written diaries. Meanwhile, we also noticed that SMBDs may diminish some of the benefits of traditional diaries and introduce new challenges that require thoughtful countermeasures.

Solicited Qualitative Diaries as A Research Method
Qualitative diaries provide rich, real-time data on experiences, capturing them as they occur and over time, accessing the contexts surrounding the experiences, and going deep into diarists’ inner worlds. Diaries are adopted as a research method (known as solicited diaries) by many researchers in education and other fields to explore participants’ self-reflections, leading to a more nuanced understanding of their experiences, emotions and subjectivities than the immediate responses commonly offered by interview or focus-group data.

Solicited SMBDs share many similarities with traditional pen-and-paper diaries as a research method. They can follow both short and intense timescales, though they are more effective in longitudinal research, where they can yield tracking data. SMBDs can be either interval-based or event-based in terms of the frequency of recording. SMBDs can range from unstructured to structured, depending on the research objectives. However, they are predominantly semi-structured as researchers tend to balance giving participants freedom of data provision and ensuring the appropriateness of the collected data.

Enhancing the Strengths and Addressing the Weaknesses of Traditional Diaries
A significant advantage of SMBDs over traditional diaries is their ability to provide a more vivid and multi-dimensional dataset for research projects. Integrating multimedia, such as images, audio, and videos, SMBDs enhances the richness of the data, making the experiences more engaging and lifelike. Moreover, the convenience and timeliness of diary entries are greatly improved due to the availability of social media software on both mobile phones and laptops, allowing participants to record their fresh thoughts and feelings in time.

SMBDs also address several inherent weaknesses of traditional diaries. Participant recruitment and retention can be easier, as the format is more appealing and aligned with the habits of modern generations. The lower time commitment and reduced likelihood of participant fatigue contribute to a higher retention rate (in our study, only one participant withdrew during the diary phase). Moreover, reactive effects—where participants’ behaviors are shaped due to the awareness of being studied—can be diminished, as SMBDs provide a more routine and natural data-providing experiences. Our research shows that even if participants who were initially unfamiliar with social media recording were slightly impacted by the research participation, the reactive effects gradually dissipate as the research goes on. Furthermore, tracking and managing data is more efficient, as researchers can readily access and organize collected entries on both phone and laptop ports, which also facilitates timely researcher-participant communication.

Undermining the Strengths and Intensifying the Challenges of Traditional Diaries
While adding some benefits, SMBDs may weaken some of the well-acknowledged advantages of traditional diaries. For example, the depth of reflection that participants might achieve in traditional diaries can be compromised. The constraints of social media—such as reluctance to detailed entries, casual expression through internet slang, and the immediacy of posts—can lead to a superficial description of events and a lack of the cogitative thoughts or contextual nuances behind them.

SMBDs can also exacerbate some challenges inherent in traditional diaries. A significant issue is the relinquishment of control to participants over the data-providing process. The fragmented and unstructured nature of social media posts can deconcentrate participants from the research focus, which may generate excursive or irrelevant information. Another challenge refers to “dairying under others’ eyes.” Realizing that their posts will be read and analyzed, participants might reserve or alter their self-expression, especially given the more complex environment of social media, where the audience is broader than just the researchers. This awareness can thereby result in a curated online persona, introducing bias into the data and complicating the analysis.

Discussions and Implications
Facing these challenges, researchers can allow participants utilize social media platforms’ functions, such as group-exclusive visibility and time-limited posts, to safeguard data privacy and encourage their authentic self-expression. Continuous engagement with participants throughout the study is also vital for data quality, requiring researchers to negotiate with participants and adapt data-providing formats as needed (e.g., participants unfamiliar with initiatively posting on social media instead reflected on their experiences by weekly plogs). Additionally, integrating SMBDs with other research methods (e.g., interview) can provide a triangulation of data, enabling a more robust validation of the findings. Researchers need to not only focuses on the content of the diary entries but also the process by which the data were generated, so as to make sound evaluation on the authenticity of the data.

We also suggest that researchers employing SMBDs in international educational research carefully consider the characteristics of the adopted social media platforms and the social media use habits of the studied groups. WeChat, as a social tool among acquaintances, has a semi-closed characteristic, which differs from more open social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, and may complicate or simplify participants’ diary-keeping behaviors depending on individual preferences. The choice of research tools should be made based on a comprehensive consideration of socio-cultural contexts, research objectives, and participant features.

Authors

• Xuemeng Cao, Xiamen University

• Wanyi Xie, institute of education,Tsinghua University

• Ianwen Zhang, Institute of Education, Tsinghua University

• Tianle Shi, Institute of Education, Tsinghua University