In our teaching of students and advising of master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, we have found that memos, because they are largely seen as internal sense-making documents, allow for a kind of written engagement that frees students from the constraints of formal genres of writing. Memos can be informal or formal and can be intended solely for personal use or can serve other roles (e.g., used as communication among research team members or with various thought partners and advisers). As such, the author can truly explore ideas rather than put forth a refined document. We therefore ask our students, in addition to writing an identity/positionality memo (see Chapter 3), to write an exploratory conceptual framework memo early in the development of their research studies. This assignment creates a structured opportunity to develop a narrative (that may include a corresponding graphical representation) of your emerging conceptual framework, receive feedback, and use it to engage with others early and continuously in order to develop and refine the research. A conceptual framework memo can include the following focal sections (but we argue that these can be constructed in many different ways per your preferences in terms of how you process information).
Topics to include/consider in this memo:
1. Research topic, including context, setting, population in focus, and broad contextual framing
2. Research questions and study goals
3. Role of the following to your potential research:
- Self (e.g., social identity, positionality)
- Context(s) (e.g., institution/community, state, country, historical moment)
- Goals (e.g., personal, practical, intellectual; see Maxwell, 2013, for a discussion of these goals)
4. Description of the relationship between your research question(s), conceptual framework, and research design choices (may also include bullet points of research design)
5. Overall methodological approach and potential research methods
6. The tacit theories that have informed your research question(s) and/or topic
7. The formal theories that guide and inform your study (theoretical framework)
8. Ways that you plan to implement structured reflexivity (individual reflection and dialogic engagement) throughout your study
Connecting Research Questions With Methods
In this approach to aligning your research methods with your research questions, which is a crucial step in all qualitative research, you take each research question (and subquestion) and align your research methods with it in two ways:
1. Detail the specific data collection methods that you’ll use to attain the information required to answer the research questions. For example, if you wish to understand how doctors implement a procedure based on what they learned in a specific professional development session, you’d not only want to interview them, but you would need to observe them in their daily work settings to triangulate the data. You may also choose to interview their colleagues and/or patients to see what they note about how the physicians implement their learning. You might also consider putting together focus groups to initiate groupthink between the doctors and would certainly want to see artifacts of the professional development initiative (e.g., schedule of topics, session format, any materials used during the session) as well as relevant documents from the facilitating organization running the professional development and even the individual facilitator for context.
2. Connect specific instrument questions to each research question so that you are sure your data collection instruments will in fact garner the data necessary for you to be able to respond to each aspect of your research questions.
See Table 5.7, Figure 5.1, and Table 11.3 for potential templates you can use for this exercise. We ask students to fill these out prior to class and bring them in for discussion in pairs.
Core Constructs in Research Questions
This memo also defines each of the core constructs in your research questions. For example, if you are studying professors’ perceptions about the effectiveness of a civic engagement curriculum for fostering a social justice orientation in college students, you need to clearly articulate what each of these constructs (i.e., faculty perceptions, criteria for judging curricular effectiveness, student civic engagement, social justice orientation) means and how you define them so that you can understand how to approach them analytically and in terms of the research design and which specific data collection methods to employ. In addition, you want to consider which teachers to focus on (e.g., Is it a specific group of college students using the curriculum? Are you interested in engaging with specific groups or subgroups of college students? If so, why?). This process is intended to help you scrutinize each component of your research questions and requires you to be precise and clear in the wording and phrasing of the questions since the entire research design will be built onto these core constructs.
