دفتر خاطرات شخصی رویداد در مورد تعارضات زناشویی، تعاملات زناشویی را تغییر می دهد؟

Recent increase in the use of diary measures has prompted questions about the effect completing diaries has on participants. After extensive training, married couples completed event-contingent diaries about their couple disagreements for 15 days, focusing on emotional and behavioral aspects of marital conflict. Serving as a control for placebo effects of participation, the diary group (n=110) and a non-randomized control group (n=57) also completed brief daily checklists, with minimal training, over the reporting period. Before and after the reporting period, couples engaged in videotaped conflict-resolution tasks that were coded for conflict behaviors and emotions expressed. ANOVAs comparing groups indicated that completing event-contingent diaries for 15 days had no apparent effects on observed husbands’ and wives’ expressed emotions and behaviors during marital interactions. Parental reports on the brief daily diaries indicated minimal differences between the groups in global measures of marital functioning. At the same time, husbands’ self-reports in the home indicated decreasing perceptions of marital quality over the recording period. Thus, although no differences in conflict tactics emerged based on observed marital interactions in the laboratory, certain self-reports of responding suggested potential reactivity effects.

Within marital research, questions of ecological validity concerning traditional methods of measurement (e.g., global self-report questionnaires, laboratory observations) have prompted researchers to develop new methods that capture events as they occur in context (Bolger, Davis, & Rafaeli, 2003; Cummings, Davies, & Campbell, 2000; Green, Rafaeli, Bolger, Shrout, & Reis, 2006). A common criticism of questionnaire data is that participants must rely on recollection of events, feelings, and behaviors and that reliance on memory could affect the accuracy of the reports (Stone & Shiffman, 2002). At the same time, results based on laboratory observation may not generalize outside of the laboratory setting.