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As the consumer experience literature broadens in scope – specifically, from dyads to ecosystems and from provider-centric to consumer-centric perspective – traditional data collection methods are no longer adequate. In that context, the paper aims to discuss three little-used data collection methods that can contribute to this broader view of consumer experience.

The paper identifies methodological requirements for exploring the broadened view of consumer experience and reviews data collection methods currently in use.

The paper elaborates tailored guidelines for the study of consumer experience through first-hand, systemic and processual perspectives for three promising and currently underused data collection methods: phenomenological interviews, event-based approaches and diary methods.

Although the list of identified methods is not exhaustive, the methods and guidelines discussed here can be used to advance empirical investigation of consumer experience as more broadly understood.

Practitioners can apply these methods to gain a more complete view of consumers’ experiences and so offer value propositions compatible with those consumers’ lifeworlds.

The paper principally contributes to the literature in two ways: by defining the methodological requirements for investigating consumer experience from consumer-centric, systemic and processual perspectives, and by specifying a set of data collection methods that meet these requirements, along with tailored guidelines for their use.

We illustrate the potential of diaries for advancing scholarship on organization studies and grand challenges. Writing personal diaries is a time-honored and culturally sanctioned way of animating innermost thoughts and feelings, and embodying experiences through self-talk with famous examples, such as the diaries written by Anne Frank, Andy Warhol, or Thomas Mann. However, the use of diaries has long been neglected in organization studies, despite their historical and societal importance. We illustrate how different forms of analyzing diaries enable a “deep analysis of individuals’ internal processes and practices” (Radcliffe, 2018) which cannot be gleaned from other sources of data such as interviews and observations. Diaries exist in different forms, such as “unsolicited diaries” and “solicited diaries” and have different purposes. We evaluate how analyzing diaries can be a valuable source to illuminate the innermost thoughts and feelings of people at the forefront of grand challenges. To exemplify our arguments, we draw on diaries written by medical professionals working for Doctors Without Borders as part of our empirical research project conducted in extreme contexts. We show the value of unsolicited diaries in revealing people’s thought world that is not apprehensible from other modes of communication, and offer a set of practical guidelines on working with data from diaries. Diaries serve to enrich our methodological toolkit by capturing what people think and feel behind the scenes but may not express nor display in public.

This paper aims to examine the impact of problem-solving activities, emotional experiences and contextual and personal factors on learning from dealing with software-related problems in everyday office work.

To measure the use of problem-solving activities, emotional experiences and the contextual factors of problem characteristics and learning in situ, a research diary was used. To measure team psychological safety (contextual factor) and personal factors, including the Big Five personality traits, occupational self-efficacy and technology self-efficacy, the authors administered a self-report questionnaire. In sum, 48 students from a software company in Germany recorded 240 diary entries during five working days. The data was analysed using multilevel analysis.

Results revealed that asking others and using information from the internet are positive predictors of self-perceived learning from a software-related problem, while experimenting, which was the most common activity, had a negative effect on learning. Guilt about the problem was positively related to learning while working in the office (as opposed to remote work), and feeling irritated/annoyed/angry showed a negative effect. Surprisingly, psychological safety had a negative effect on perceived learning.

Major limitations of the study concern the convenience sample and the disregard for the sequence of the activities.

This study contributes to the limited empirical evidence on employees’ problem-solving activities and informal workplace learning in the software context. To overcome the shortcomings of previous studies using retrospective assessments and in-lab observations, this study uses the diary method to investigate in situ.

This qualitative research set out to understand what teachers’ assessments were of the context of teaching as it relates to the curriculum, and what they consider appropriate for an optimal teaching and learning experience in a university English language teaching (ELT) context.

Qualitative data were deemed required to understand the effects and understanding teachers had of the ELT curriculum as it played out in their teaching context. Focus group interviews and observations were the main method for data generation.

The context has a bearing on the ongoing development of teachers’ intercultural sensitivity (IS) frames and how they address IS over time in their context of teaching as it pertains to curriculum.

This is an original research paper which gives insight to knowledge about the relationship between ELT, curriculum and culture.

The purpose of the paper is to theorize how to develop student entrepreneurs' ability to reflect by means of a learning activity called the entrepreneurial diary, which seeks to develop self-regulated learners capable of intelligent entrepreneurial action. The importance of self-regulation in entrepreneurship is linked to the individual's ability to make judgments under conditions of uncertainty, which requires reflective thinking.

The paper builds on a synthesized conceptualization of three main literature strands, reflective thinking, cognitive-load theory and experiential entrepreneurship education. In addition to the synthesized conceptualization, it builds on some empirical insights derived from a venture creation master programme in which the learning activity has been developed and refined for the last seven years.

The main finding from the paper is the theoretical justification for why reflective thinking deserves an important place in the educational process and how the entrepreneurial diary as a learning activity can create a bridge between theory and practice in venture creation programmes that take an experience-based pedagogical approach. Furthermore, the study also provides some empirical insights of how students create self-awareness of their learning through the method and the metareflection reports. Self-awareness is foundational for developing conditional knowledge on why and when to make entrepreneurial decisions to balance the often action-oriented processes seen in venture creation programmes.

The paper provides both a practical learning activity to be used in the entrepreneurial classroom and a theoretical contribution on how entrepreneurial experience is transformed into entrepreneurial knowledge to enhance students' judgmental abilities to make entrepreneurial decisions in future entrepreneurial endeavours.

Collaboration between universities and industry is increasingly perceived as a vehicle to enhance innovation. Educational institutions are encouraged to build partnerships and multidisciplinary projects based around real-world open problems. Projects need to benefit student learning, not only the organisations looking for innovations. The context of this study is a multidisciplinary innovation project, as experienced by the students of an University of Applied Sciences in Finland. The purpose of this paper is to unfold students’ conceptions of the learning experience, to help teachers and curriculum designers to organise optimal conditions and processes, and support competence development. The research question was: How do students in higher professional education experience their learning in a multidisciplinary innovation project?

The study took a phenomenographic approach. The data were collected in the form of weekly diaries, maintained by the cultural management and social services students (n=74) in a mandatory multidisciplinary innovation project in professional higher education in Finland. The diary data were analysed using thematic inductive analysis.

The results of the study revealed that students’ understood the learning experience in relation to solvable conflicts and unusual situations they experienced during the project, while becoming aware of and claiming their collaborative agency and internalising phases of an innovation process. The competences as learning outcomes that students could name as developed related to content knowledge, different personal characteristics, social skills, emerging leadership skills, creativity, future orientation, social skills, technical, crafting and testing skills and innovation implementation-related skills, such as marketing, sales and entrepreneurship planning skills. However, future orientation and implementation planning skills showed more weakly than other variables in the data.

The findings suggest that curriculum design should enable networked, student-led and teacher supported pedagogical innovation processes that involve a whole path from future thinking and idea development through prototyping to implementation planning of the novel solution. Teachers promote deep comprehension of the innovation process, monitor and ease the pain of conflict if it threatens motivation, offer assessment tools and help in recognising gaps in individual competences and development needs, promote more future-oriented, concrete and implementable outcomes, and facilitate in bridging from innovation towards entrepreneurship planning.

The multidisciplinary innovation project described in this study provides a pedagogical way to connect higher education to the practises of society. These results provide encouraging findings for organising multidisciplinary project activities between education and working life. The paper, therefore, has significant value for teachers and entrepreneurship educators in designing curriculum and facilitating projects. The study promotes the dissemination of innovation development programmes in between education and work organisations also in other than technical and commercial fields.

The purpose of this paper is to increase understanding about how to improve customer value and to make mobile banking services a profitable business for banks and other financial actors. The study explores the user experiences and related value of a new mobile banking service.

The study is implemented as a case study that is phenomenological in nature and linked to an interpretive consumer study. Empirical data were collected through 14 semi-structured theme interviews and a diary method. The data were analysed by using a content analysis method.

The findings illustrate the importance of customer centricity in the mobile banking context by identifying customer experience and related value in a new mobile banking service. The study extends current understanding of customer experience as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon by including value related to process, the use situation and the outcome, and it identifies temporality as influencing and connecting all these aspects. The study identifies several aspects that help us to understand what creates value for the customer while using mobile banking services.

As one limitation, this study was conducted in a developed country and the findings could be different in an emerging market context. Another limitation relates to the data, as the interviewees’ age range is quite limited, ranging between 20 and 40 years. However, they represent the consumers who normally use mobile services well and thus provide reliable data about their use experiences.

As the banking industry is currently experiencing rapid and widespread changes and customers become more demanding, it is crucial for banks and other mobile service providers to understand the everyday lives of their customers and to integrate their future services into the customers’ value creation processes as smoothly and inseparably as possible. The findings of this study will help banks and other financial institutions to develop their strategies and operations in regard to customer-oriented thinking, which will further help them to create long-term, profitable customer relationships and improve future viability.

The study contributes to bank marketing research and extends previous research on customer-centred service marketing by providing a framework that identifies the value related to customer experience in a new mobile banking service. It explores the experiences of actual mobile banking service customers’ and the related value, and thus provides original implications for both theory and practice.

Drawing upon the conservation of resources theory, the authors expected that daily micro-events, daily hassles and uplifts at work influenced well-being via work engagement at the daily level.

The authors conducted two diary studies. In study 1, 181 workers answered a daily questionnaire for four working days (N = 181 × 4 = 724). In study 2, 51 workers filled in a questionnaire for ten consecutive working days (N = 51 × 10 = 510).

In study 1, the results demonstrated that work engagement fully mediated the effects of daily uplifts on well-being and partially mediated the effects of daily hassles on well-being. The results of study 2 revealed a full mediation for both kinds of daily micro-events. Hence, daily uplifts stimulated work engagement, which, in turn, enhanced well-being, and daily hassles minimized work engagement and, consequently, well-being.

The relationships explored provide new theoretical elements for models that explain well-being.

Customer experience research predominantly anchors the customer journey on a specific offering, implying an inherently firm-centric perspective. Attending calls for a more customer-centric approach, this study aims to develop a goal-oriented view of customer journeys.

This study interprets the results of a phenomenological study of a transformative journey toward a sober life with the self-regulation model of behavior to advance understanding of customer journeys.

The consumer's journey toward a higher-order goal encompasses various customer journeys toward subordinate goals, through which consumers engage in iterative cognitive and behavioral processes to adjust or maintain their experienced situation vis-à-vis the goal. Experiences drive behavior toward the goal. It follows that negative experiences may contribute to goal attainment.

This study highlights the importance of looking at the consumers' higher-order goals to obtain a more holistic understanding of the customer journey.

Companies and organizations should extend their view beyond the immediate goals of their customers to identify relevant touchpoints and other customer journeys that affect the customer experience.

This study proposes conceptualization of the customer journey, comprising goal-oriented processes at different hierarchical levels, and it demonstrates how positive and negative customer experiences spur behaviors toward the higher-order consumer goal. This conceptualization enables a more customer-centric perspective on journeys.

Given the instability and volatility of the labour market and the global talent scarcity, placing more attention on job employability is fundamental. In this context, the literature has already extensively examined employability as a crucial individual aspect, identifying some significant antecedents, including the applicability of training on the job. The present study aims to examine the impact that teaching employees to craft their job may have on the levels of applicability of training and if, in turn, this improves self-perceived employability.

The authors involved three private organizations that followed three workshops on job crafting behaviour. To empirically assess the intervention, the authors asked participants of the workshop to complete four quantitative diaries on a weekly basis, i.e. one per week, one before the intervention and three after the intervention. The diaries comprised measures of job crafting behaviours, applicability of training and self-perceived employability.

Multi-level analysis of data collected provided support to the positive associations between job crafting behaviour and self-perceived employability with the mediating effect of applicability of training. Notably, the applicability of training improves when individuals search for challenges, which indirectly affects perceived employability in terms of organizational sense.

In the present study, no control group was used with which the results of our intervention could be compared. However, this does not affect the overall results, given the amount of intraindividual variability.

The paper proposes initial avenues for promoting employability at work via the use of behavioural job crafting intervention.