Health Diaries in Nursing Research and Practice

Abstract

Health diaries have been used in research and clinical practice to examine the daily symptoms of healthy and ill people, responses to symptoms, and efficacy of symptom response. This article describes current uses of health diaries in nursing research and practice, the types of typical health diaries, factors affecting the quality of diary data, and the costs and analytic issues related to health diaries. The implications of health diaries for nursing education, practice, and research are considered.

Challenges during long-term follow-up of ICU patients with and without chronic disease

“…Another approach is to use patient diaries. 12 Diaries offer the opportunity for patients to reflect on their experiences 13 and enable patients and researchers to better understand what happened to them in ICU. 14 However, diaries are often written at the time of the critical illness episode and not of patients' experiences after leaving hospital.…”

The Difficulties of Studying Children's Pain at Home

“…Often journal-style diaries are more open-ended and useful for eliciting information that may not be captured in the ledger format. Diaries may be effective in diminishing the influence of social desirability and may reflect the participant's actual experience more than data collected in interviews (Burman, 1995;Maikler, 2000). Researchers have found the diary to be useful for capturing data related to triggers, duration, and intensity of pain; level of distress; and effectiveness of treatment (Dampier, Ely, Eggleston, Brodecki, & O'Neal, 2004;Maikler, 2000).…”

“…Burman (1995) described two types of diaries in nursing research: the ledger-style and the journal-style diary. In the ledger-style diary, participants are asked to record only when the studied event occurs and are given specific questions to answer at that time.…”

“…Diaries have been used to collect quantitative and qualitative data in a wide variety of populations, disciplines, and settings (Burman, 1995). Burman (1995) described two types of diaries in nursing research: the ledger-style and the journal-style diary.…”

Measuring Elders' Symptoms With Daily Diaries and Retrospective Reports

“…Daily diary studies usually ask respondents to provide data over a week, a number of weeks, or a few months (Burman, 1995). A few studies request data over a year or two (Ely, Dampier, Gilday, O'Neal, & Brodecki, 2002;Gold, Weiss, Tager, Segal, & Speizer, 1989;Norman, McFarlane, Streiner, & Neale, 1982).…”