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ARS09
RevitalizingMedia Diaries as aMethod for Audience Research
H. Moe
1
1
University of Bergen, Information Science and Media Studies, Bergen, Norway
This panel aims to revitalize an often overlooked method for qualitative analyses of media use and audience practices: diaries. Diaries have been utilized in
disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and media studies, but are not nearly as frequently applied as interviews or focus groups. Our research thus miss
out on the unique advantages diaries offer: the potential for non-invading, continuous data collection over time, and the possibilities for detailed logging
coupled with informants’ reflection on their own practices. There are two main reasons why this panel is particularly timely at this point: First, media use
is getting exceedingly more entangled, as signalled by the growing attention to the need to study cross-media use. Our use of media technologies flows
together. Social media are integrated parts of tv watching, online news actors have left it to Facebook to handle reader comments on their journalism, and
the mobile phone has morphed into an ubiquitous apparatus for multimedia experiences. This requires a nuanced, qualitative approach to make sense of,
and disentangle uses, and understand new interconnections and processes of meaning-making. Different versions of the diaries method can help - and this
panel offers an opportunity to share experiences with diaries for this purpose in different kinds of research projectsThe second reason for enlivening debates
on media diaries at this time is connected to technological developments: Computer tools that facilitate the collection of large data sets on online media
use could potentially replace the component of media diaries that seeks to log media use. Such tools have been utilized by media researchers lately, but
rarely in combination with a qualitative approach to diaries. A combination of automatic logging of information with diaries where informants can reflect
on their own use provides a new potential, and could also limit the well known challenges with diaries, e.g. tiredness and high drop-out rates amongst in‑
formants. The panel will offer a critical discussion of the potential merits and challenges of integrating such tools in qualitative audience research. Bringing
together leading scholars with a distinct cross-media interest, from five European countries, this panel provides a much-needed opportunity to critically
discuss issues of methodology in audience and reception studies. In addition to the five individual paper presentations, Anne Kaun (Södertörn Uni) will act
as respondent.
PN 158
Online Media Diaries as a Stepping Stone for Examining Media Experiences and the Fragmentation of Media Selections
R. Tammi
1
, K. Härmälä
2
1
Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland
2
University of Tampere, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Tampere, Finland
This paper discusses a study where online media diaries were employed as the first of four methods in an iterative research process. The aim of the diaries
was to examine the diversity of the participants’media use as well as the reasons behind their media choices. The subsequent methods were media land‑
scape interviews (Tammi, 2016), ethnographic visits and reading aloud interviews to investigate fragmentation of media selections, media practices and
experiences of reading a magazine. Four participant groups (n=44) conducted individual and private online media diaries.The groups were ten 16–18 year-
old high school students, twelve 18–25 year-old young adults, ten 35–45 year-old men and twelve 45–55 year-old women. In the diaries the participants
were asked to report those media titles they used during the two or four week period, and also elaborate on the why’s and how’s of their media choices.
The diaries were complemented with two assignments: the most memorable media experience of the previous week, and listing the seven most important
media titles. The diaries were written on a wiki-platform PBWorks.com (see also Kaun, 2010). The data offered an in-depth perspective to the participants’
everyday media lives, including information about the mundane media routines, the ritual and multisensory experiences with the most engaging titles as
well as the meaning of the social practices in choosing between titles. The challenges were associated with the group-specific features. Many of the 45–55
year-old women described their experiences extensively, whereas the 35–45 year-old men barely listed the titles they used. Especially the 16–18 and
18–25 year-old participants’ mobile media practices were often out of reach of the online platform that was impossible to update on mobile devices.
The diary data facilitated the succeeding methods in two ways. First, all the titles reported within the groups were collected into a card deck, which the par‑
ticipants sorted under eight categories of importance in the media landscape interviews.These maps – personal media landscapes –were used in analysing
the fragmentation of the media selections and individualisation of media titles within the groups. Second, the open-ended descriptions of the experiences
with the most engaging titles were used as data in the qualitative analyses of media engagement. References: Kaun, A. (2010). Open-Ended Online Diaries:
Capturing Life as It Is Narrated. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 9(2), 133–148. Tammi, R. (2016). Engaging with media in the fragmented
media environment, Aalto University. Helsinki.
PN 159
Prompting Daily Life: Using Digital Media Diaries to Enrich Qualitative Interviews
J. Ørmen
1
1
University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
A great challenge for empirical media research is how to study routine and habitual media behavior in daily life. Research has shown that people are unable
to accurately recall detailed media activities when asked in surveys (see e.g. Boase & Ling, 2013; Prior, 2009) and in qualitative interviews research easily
end up addressing people’s idealized rather than actualized behavior. Therefore we need different methods to explore the intricacies of routine media use in
more accurate ways. The digital media diary appears as an attractive alternative that is less obtrusive than observation studies, yet more suitable for map‑
ping media use in daily life than surveys or interviews. In recent years, a number of digital tools have emerged that can ease the process of collecting media
diaries online. This has opened up possibilities for getting detailed information about media use in subtle and less demanding ways. One strand of research
has explored ways of using passive logging from digital devices to create a form of automated media diaries (see e.g. Ørmen & Thorhauge, 2015), whereas
others have sought ways to activate users to provide information (see e.g. Hargittai & Karr, 2009). In this paper, I discuss how these versions of digital media
diaries can be used to describe media use more accurately than comparable methods and provide a rich background for follow-up studies. The discussion