Qualitative Research: An Introduction to Methods and Designs

Memo Writing

While researchers are gathering, coding, or analyzing data, they will likely come up with ideas or thoughts about their codes or relationships between codes, or they might come up with questions they want to answer in their further investigation. In order to remember these thoughts and questions, researchers write them down. Memos are such analytic or conceptual notes. According to Glaser (1978), memos are “the theorizing write-up of ideas about codes and their relationships as they strike the analyst while coding” (p. 83). Memos can also be defined as “the narrated records of a theorist's analytical conversations with him/herself about the research data” (Lempert, 2007, p. 247). By memo writing, we take a step back and ask, “What ...