Writing Memos: A Vital Classic Grounded Theory Task

The process of writing and sorting memos is an important and indeed vital component of doing a classic grounded theory study. Writing memos allows a researcher to move from description to richer, more mature memos ultimately ending with a sophisticated, rich, conceptual, multivariate theory. Memos are compared one with another through a method called constant comparison. Any heretofore unknown connections are established during the comparison and sorting process. These connections develop and become increasingly conceptual during the entire memoing process. Through the entire mandatory process of writing and sorting memos that have been presented in many works of Glaser, the problem is that it is still misunderstood by novice researchers who have not experienced such a process and who are more accustomed to various analytic procedures common in qualitative data analysis. In this methodological paper, I will take the reader broadly through the memo process to present and further elucidate this important and sometimes confusing tenet of classic grounded theory. The purpose of this methodological paper is to provide explanations regarding the memo process in classic grounded theory.