The use of diaries in psychological research: The creative and dialogical intimacy of self-other-world relationships in the context of cultural mutations

Abstract

This paper discusses the potential for accessing the intersubjective psychic dynamics that the use of oral diaries about everyday life can offer to Psychology, from an ideographic, cultural, and qualitative perspective. Based on the authors’ experience with this research activity mediated by instant messaging applications, we argue about the singularity produced by such a field of elaboration of meanings regarding the affective, ambiguous and potentially creative and authorial face of such enunciations. The use of this research instrument took place during critical periods of the COVID-19 pandemic, a historical moment marked by a profound decentering of forms of life, which was the driving force behind significant cultural mutations both in the personal and collective spheres. We propose that the instrument provided interpretative access to three fundamental records of experience, namely: corporeality, temporality, and the meaning-making process.

Diaries as Technologies for Sense-making and Self-transformation in Times of Vulnerability

“…Researchers from various disciplines have approached diaries as "windows" on the sense-making dynamics at work under different sociohistorical circumstances: the Spanish Republican exile (Montiel Rayo, 2018), the Nazi extermination camps (Cohler, 2012;Garbarini, 2006), World Wars I (Zittoun, 2020) and II (Gillespie et al, 2008;Zittoun, 2014;Zittoun & Gillespie, 2015), and the Covid-19 pandemic (Hawlina & Zittoun, 2022;Pinheiro et al, 2022). These works highlight the importance of diaries as longitudinal data that give researchers access to the "real-time" development of the person's mode of dealing with difficult events, to the slow work of making sense of experience until a new form of relative equilibrium is achieved, or to the difficulties of these processes across the life course .…”

Diaries as technologies for sense-making and self-transformation in times of vulnerability.

“…From the "window" to the Foucauldian technology Researchers from various disciplines have approached diaries as "windows" on the sense-making dynamics at work under different sociohistorical circumstances: the Spanish Republican exile (Montiel Rayo, 2018), the Nazi extermination camps (Cohler, 2012;Garbarini, 2006), World Wars I (Zittoun, 2020) and II (Gillespie et al, 2008;Zittoun, 2014Zittoun & Gillespie, 2015), and the Covid-19 pandemic (Hawlina & Zittoun, 2022;Pinheiro et al, 2022). These works highlight the importance of diaries as longitudinal data that give researchers access to the "real-time" development of the person's mode of dealing with di cult events, to the slow work of making sense of experience until a new form of relative equilibrium is achieved, or to the di culties of these processes across the life course , 2021.…”