‘Artistic Memoing’ as a technique in Constructivist Grounded Theory

The late Constructivist Grounded Theorist Kathy Charmaz’s “memo-writing” technique involves writing about how categories are connected to the data. Likewise, artistic memoing is a visual, or multimodal artistic response about how categories are connected to the data. Artistic memoing can capture naturalistic observations about data that are hard to put into words and can provide clarity about how to describe data in a written form by visualizing it first. An artistic memo is not about a researcher—it is about the data that a researcher collects. Given this, there are ethical considerations involved in artistic memoing in studies that involve human participants specifically, so that the artistic memo does not result in an objective representation of a participant. During semi-structured interviews in my doctoral research study, “‘What makes a great story?’: Multidisciplinary and International Perspectives on Digital Stories Created by Youth Formerly in Foster Care in Canada,” I noticed that participants often responded in similar ways to certain digital stories or themes within them. At times, I felt compelled to respond to what they said in an artistic, or visual way, rather than a written way. In this paper, I present a working definition of “artistic memoing,” which I describe in past research. Drawing upon Charmaz’s discussion of “memo-writing,” in this paper, I place artistic memoing as a reflexive technique within Constructivist Grounded Theory analysis.