An interesting example of this occurred during one of my own qualitative investigations involving teenagers.
I had designed what I thought to be a very good search log (a diary of their information seeking behaviour) for each participant in my study and asked them to use it. After 20 weeks of the field work, only two of the 16 teenagers had begun to use their logs to keep a record of their searches. They were happy with the organization and format of the log and thought that the information provided in it was clear and gave them a valuable framework for recording their work. The 14 teenagers who had made no entries gave a variety of reasons for not complying with my request: ‘I haven’t done any research projects’, ‘I forgot what to do’, ‘It interferes with my work’, ‘It takes up too much time’, ‘I can’t be bothered’ and ‘I don’t want to walk
around with a great big yellow book, I feel stupid’.