> Qualitative Analysis
Familiarization & Memoing
Before you code, you read — and you write notes about what you notice. · 7 min
Coding too early is the classic beginner mistake. Both traditions start the same way: immerse yourself in the data, then write memos — informal analytic notes that capture hunches before they harden into codes (Saldaña, 2021) (Charmaz, 2014).
- Read the whole transcript once without labeling anything. Get the gist.
- Re-read and jot. In the margins, note what strikes you — surprises, repetitions, contradictions, emotion.
- Write an analytic memo. A few sentences: what might be going on here? What questions does it raise?
- Hold your jottings loosely. They are candidates for codes, not codes yet.
Our example, at the jotting stage
Here is the first slice of our debugging interviews. The highlighted spans are early jottings — click one to see the memo a researcher might write. Notice these are observations and questions, not yet tidy codes.
Walk me through the last time you got really stuck on an assignment.
So it was this linked-list thing and I kept getting a null pointer exception. before I said anything. Honestly for not getting something that seemed basic. Before that I . When I finally went up, and I felt kind of stupid for waiting so long.
Click a highlighted segment to see how it was coded and why.
In the next lesson we turn these jottings into a first pass of codes.