Memo Writing
Paul Mihas
ResearchTalk
Let the Data Be Your Guide
Copyright ResearchTalk 2013
Engaging the Data
 Key quotations with memos
 Coding text
 Contextual considerations
 Document summaries
 Episode profiles (visual
representation of data)
 Diagrams (clustering)
 Writing for discovery (memo
writing)
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Memos
Telling yourself what you’re thinking
Memo Writing
Notice the following in the data:
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What language stands out to you?
Is there a flow, or lack of flow, of the narrative?
What process is at issue here?
 E.g., denying diagnosis, coming to terms
 What is the larger context of the narrative?
 What does this one piece of the text teach you about
your research question?
 Who is the audience for your memo?
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Memos
 Approaches to memo writing
Record
Reflect
Debate
Show and tell
Data Excerpt
Denise: Our daughter stayed in touch as much as she could. We didn't
have a computer then, and her unit didn't have email. Letters took three
or four weeks to reach her. I couldn't help but follow the news on Iraq. I
had even higher blood pressure by now, plus heart trouble. My new
doctor wanted to place me in the hospital to get me stabilized, but I told
him I had things I had to do. The medication he put me on didn't wipe me
out and it got my blood pressure down, but I knew that when I ran out I'd
be out for a while. I took the medicine every two or three days. I didn't tell
my husband because he would try to work himself to death to get it for me
and he was already working long hours.
I didn't smile a lot. I had a huge weight gain. I aged about ten or fifteen
years while Shanell was gone. By the time she was in Iraq three months,
people who didn't know me well thought I was my own mother.
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Memo on Excerpt
 Memo: I notice how Denise’s communication with Shanell is
transformed since her daughter’s deployment. Denise is
aware of how this has affected her own health, but she
resists her doctor’s advice. She is not only struggling with
Shanell’s absence from home but struggling to keep her own
health condition from her husband – as well as struggling to
self-medicate. Denise is aware of how Shanell’s deployment
has changed her affect, body, and aging. There is a growing
awareness is this excerpt, an awareness of endurance or
perhaps of things going from bad to worse.
Revisit Excerpt
 What else, if anything, do you see when you reread the excerpt?
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Memo 2 on Excerpt
 Memo: I notice how Denise creates several strategies for dealing/coping
with her situation. One strategy is to keep her husband in the dark about
her medication. Another strategy is to resist her physician’s advice. “My
new doctor wanted to place me in the hospital to get me stabilized, but I
told him I had things I had to do.” Denise is partially in control here. She
has some agency. Another strategy is to follow the news in Iraq.
 Other strategies, perhaps, are how she deals with her own body and
self-image – she self-medicates, she gains weight, she becomes
hyperaware. These are all the result of Shannell’s deployment. Some of
these strategies seem to be by choice, some are not. I wonder what will
happen to these strategies over time. I wonder what will happen to her
relationship with her husband, her physician, and the media over time
and what this will teach me about my research question.
In-class Exercise: Write a Memo
1.
2.
3.
4.
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Read part of a transcript
Choose a segment
Assign a title to the memo
Write a memo about the segment
Record or reflect – or both
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Reading Data Documents
Considerations
 How did you engage with the data excerpt?
 What were your feelings or reactions to the
person interviewed?
 What did you learn?
 How is your learning affected by your
background, engagement, and reactions?
Possible Approaches to Memo
Writing
Quotation memo
“What do I know so far?”
Document summary
Methods memo
Hunch memo
Positionality memo
Theoretical memo
Statement memo
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Data Excerpt
 Denise: I was shaky the whole time (that Shanell was in Iraq). At one point,
anything anybody said to me, I'd cry. One time at church, someone asked
how my daughter was doing, and I just turned around and went back home.
My husband couldn't even talk to me. It was just uncontrollable crying. I later
found out from Shanell that she was close to death from dehydration and
other problems during that same time, which lasted about three weeks. She
was rapidly losing weight and would faint. They would hook her to an IV and
pump her up with fluids, then send her back to work. That kept up until she
was incoherent and had lost thirty-eight pounds in two weeks. Then she was
air-lifted to a medical facility where a young medic took good care of her. I
learned most of this much later from that young medic, after they both came
home. Back then he'd seen what shape Shanell was in and tried to steal her
medical records and get them to me, so I could get her out of there. I believe
he got in trouble, but he won't discuss it. I only learn the real story when I
hear Shanell talking to another soldier. Especially if they think I'm not
listening.
Memo on Excerpt
 Memo: This part of the narrative describes the extent of Denise’s
emotional state and self-awareness. She’s aware that her crying is
“uncontrollable,” or at least she experiences it this way. This narrative
also gives an account of how Denise is affected by information about
her daughter. A “young medic” tells her that her daughter was air-lifted
to a medical facility after losing thirty-eight pounds. She says that she
only gets the “real story” when she overhears Shanell talking to another
soldier. So, information isn’t exactly coming from Shanell directly.
Denise is forced to piece it together from various accounts. I wonder
how the flow of information has affected Denise’s state of mind. I
wonder if getting more reliable, regular information would have helped
her cope with having her daughter being so far way and in such danger.
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What Do I Know So Far?
 Provides an audit trail of how your understanding
changes over time
 Is an indication of the breadth and depth of your
understanding
 As you read more data, notice how your
knowledge has shifted over time
Document Summary
 Gives you a kind of holistic perspective of the
respondent
 Captures the flow of the interview or focus group
 Let’s you work “vertically” through data
 Preserves the individual (or group)
 Privileges a fuller context
 Consider doing a document summary for all transcripts
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Document Summary
 Denise’s engagement with the protest movement represented the main
turning point in her narrative. Before that point, she represented her
identity as one of passivity. On page 4, for example, she feels helpless
and isolated as her daughter is facing extreme medical problems in
Iraq. She cannot speak to fellow church members or even her husband.
The active agents in this section seem to be her husband, her doctor
and her mother; she merely does what these figures tell her to do.
During this time, Denise’s own health problems grow worse, seemingly
in parallel to those of Shanell. The turning point in the narrative is
January, when she meets members of Georgia Peace and Justice
Coalition – “friendly faces.” From this point, Denise stops speaking
about her health problems and begins using more positive and active
language -- “I discovered that I really liked to speak,” she “became an
extremely active member of the Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition. . .
.
Methods Memo
 Provides a place to describe research questions
 Allows you to provide an audit-trail
 Provides a map of what’s next
 What have you done so far?
 What has it taught you about what to do next?
 Discuss steps of analysis and developing your study
 Allows you to process options
 E.g., Should I do additional interviews?
 Gives you another place to discuss theory
 Lets you connect your study to literature
(Adapted from Creswell 1998)
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Methods Memo
 Had a meeting with my supervisors yesterday to discuss the
data collection visit next month. We have decided that focus
groups are now the way to go, as I have quite a wealth of
data already from the interviews, and there are preliminary
categories established. Moreover I believe that participants
may feel more comfortable in a group situation and this may
render greater depth and breadth of information. (Birks et al.
2008)
Hunch Memo
 What issues are rising to the surface?
 Capturing points of curiosity
 Exploring propositions
 Is “giving up” related to age?
 Linking concepts
 How is “luck” related to “religion”?
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Hunch? Study on Chronic Pain
 “I ask myself, what is the main concept or storyline that integrates these
various groups? I am left perplexed. I know there is “searching for
relief,” but that seems such a logical and common explanation. It is a
process that goes on but doesn’t explain or do justice to these varied
experiences. There has to be an even better explanation. Hmm! I want
to focus on the pain experience itself, what it is like to have pain, to
suffer whether that pain is temporary or permanent. I keep coming back
to the imagery of a forest at night and the darkness, which so reminds
me of living with pain, being in darkness that is suffering both physically
and often psychologically, the fear, the stumbling, the fatigue, and the
discouragement. There is “wandering in the darkness of pain,” or “pain,
a story of suffering,” but neither of these ideas seem to quite capture it.
I can’t yet put the feeling into words. I’ll have to keep thinking about the
problem and hopefully the right conceptualization will emerge.”
(Corbin & Strauss 2006)
Positionality Memo
 A personal bias memo captures:
 Why you might have come up with these
reflections?
 What’s new to you?
 What you are resisting (or likely to see) based on
who you are?
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Personal Stance
Positionality: the position that you
assume in a given study, in a relationship to:
Personal
Values,
Experiences,
positions
Subject
Participants
Research
context
Reflexivity: the
process you use to
ensure
stance/positionality is
not detrimental to
research, such as:
• Reflexive journaling
• Positionality memo
(Savin-Baden & Howell Major 2013)
Positionality Memo
 Memo: I’m a cancer survivor. I wonder how my own experience
with lymphoma will affect how I read these narratives. I notice
that I find myself getting particularly emotional when people talk
about how they first shared their diagnosis with their friends and
family. And I’m struck at how I react to the age at which people
talk about having first been diagnosed. If someone has had
cancer in their twenties, I feel particular compassion for them.
It’s as if I’m assigning some kind of shock level – I can’t believe
that happened to you – on the experience depending on
someone’s age, but this is coming from me, not necessarily the
data. The idea of “shock” needs to be assessed separately from
what I project on participants based on their age. I tend to react
differently to people who were younger than I was when they
were diagnosed versus people who were older than I was.
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Theoretical Memo
 Discuss your world view (philosophy)
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Post-positivism
Constructivism
Advocacy
Pragmatism
 Using theoretical framework
 E.g., feminism, Marxism, Freud’s stages-of-change
 Examples of memo topics:
 Preserving sense of self
 Strategy and intentions (Goffman)
 Empowering the creative class
Theoretical Memo
 “The ‘war experience’ can be thought of as a ‘trajectory,’ or a
course that extends over time. Entering into that, war experiences
are ‘images of war’ that begin long before an individual actually
goes to war. Person pick up ‘attitudes’ and form ‘images’ based on
what they are told and see in their families, their communities, the
media including movies, and from any contact they may have had
with military personnel. Then (transitional hypothesis) when young
men join the military they begin to formulate new but not quite
‘realistic’ images of war based on their training in ‘boot camp.’
Though ‘boot camp’ may be difficult and ‘war-like’ it is not ‘war.’ It is
not until combatants actually got to Vietnam and experienced
actual combat that the ‘reality’ of what war means set in. . . .”
(Corbin 2008)
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Statement Memo
Explore a particular statement:
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
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“My body is bad real estate”
“Cancer is a blessing – and a curse”
“I was one of the lucky ones”
“I was one step ahead of the draft.”
Explore how these statements explain
other parts of the data
Parts and the Whole
 “Nature uses only the longest threads to weave
her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric
reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.”
(R. Feynman)
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Quotations Deepen Memos
 Quotations allow you to blend the general with the
specific
The people over age 100 revealed a variety of trajectories. Some matured
within the religion of their childhood, while others converted to different
religions or dissociated completely from religious communities.
Participant A says: “I say the grace of God. How you eat and how you
drink, I don’t think that’s enough to help us live. It’s God’s will.” This is
echoed by Participant B: “I think I lived long because God permit it. That is
all. Not food nor nothing could make me live. It is God that bring me to old
age.” I notice how absolute this thinking is. Participants B is even more
extreme than Participant A. She gives all the credit to God, as if food itself is
irrelevant. This religious meaning system creates a sense of subjective wellbeing. . . .
Quote Title:
Disgusted with Life after Car Accident
 I feel fine in terms of my physical health. In terms of my mental
health, on a scale of 1-10, I would have to say I am a 3 in terms
of satisfaction. I was in a bad car accident last Friday night,
May 14, I believe. The entire front of my car is smashed, not to
mention internal damage that was done. This could not have
come at a worse time. I have had so many papers to write and
final exams to study for. I did not need a huge car accident on
top of all this stress, not to mention that I will soon have a
degree and no job to show for it. I know people are saying that I
was lucky to walk away from the accident, and that I should be
thankful for that. But my freedom has been taking away from
me, and I have to depend on my family, friends, or the bus for
transportation. I just feel very disgusted with life right now. I
thought graduation was supposed to be a happy time, but I
really cannot say that I feel happy..
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