Writing in the margins: exploratory noting in IPA

Having said that, there are definitely some things to look out for, and I wrote another post about some of the red flags I notice when I'm reviewing work - red flags because they indicate where people need to do more work to underpin a more developed analysis later on.

I know it can be useful to see examples of what other people do, for inspiration and reassurance. Smith et al. (2022, pp. 88-89) include examples of exploratory notes, but it isn't typically reported, so there aren't too many other examples out there. I went through some of my own initial noting to gather examples to show you what this might look like in practice. Interestingly, I saw that my noting in NVivo (photo above) seems a lot more 'sensible' than some of the examples I posted below - probably because it got revised multiple times as I created themes using the software (so you might argue it's not really initial or exploratory noting, but qualitative research IS an iterative process and our ideas develop and get refined as we work with our data).

In our workshops, we talk about different types of notes you might generate, and work through examples. I went through some of my Excel-coded data and noticed some patterns in the types of notes I tend to create to give you a wider variety of ideas about how this might look in practice. The bullet points are my actual notes; I've sometimes added commentary in square brackets.

One worders

I started with this because I'm breaking the rules I often tell students about making sure initial notes are informative enough to do something with later, and not to be too high level with the labels being used! Some of mine included:

• wait, hope, social, relaxation and enjoyment.

Likely these ones stayed short because they didn't get developed as the analysis progressed - they were initial ideas or responses to the data that didn't fit into a developing analysis.

Contrasts

I obviously like noting contrasts and contradictions, or identifying where participants seem to be making an explicit or implicit comparison because I make a lot of notes like this (you'll likely have different kinds of things you tend to notice in your data):

• dichotomy between wonderful experience of something you wouldn't choose to experience! [Participant was describing their experience of treatment]

• again, privacy vs being able to share experiences

Links to other theoretical concepts

There are a few places where I picked out concepts that link with other research, such as:

• big physical metaphor [refers to ‘being mowed down by a bus’]

• completing a three-part list?! [My PhD supervisor is a discursive psychologist and introduced me to many concepts from that area, including three part-lists - yes, I included the question mark and exclamation mark in my original notes]

This type of noting is informed by wider reading AND things I learned from my supervisor/other collaborators.

It looked interesting, but I wasn't sure what to say

This happens a lot: I see something that catches my attention, but I can't articulate why. However, those points are often fruitful for later thinking. Some examples include:

• how sick do you have to be to go to the doctor?

• 'done well' - stands out, not sure why

• I think this is interesting, but not sure what to say about it

The first point did get carried further into the analysis as we ended up writing about illness identity and what it means to be sick (and have cancer in particular as that was the focus of this study).

My commentary on what I'm reading

I'm far too fond of exclamation marks...

• interesting way of phrasing 'no operation I COULD HAVE' - almost like she would have if she could have!

•  kind of cagey!

•  I wish we knew why!

No more comments, just that I need to get my punctuation under control....

In summary

This reflects my own style and way of working, but you'll see these are definitely informal, cover a range of 'angles' on the data, and I don't always have answers in my response to the data. Although we wrote a couple of papers from this data, I believe this is mostly reflected in:

Phillips, E., Montague, J., & Archer, S. (2017). “A peculiar time in my life”: Making sense of illness and recovery with gynaecological cancer. International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-Being, 12(1), 1364603. https://doi.org/10.1080/17482631.2017.1364603

You can see a few places where those notes inform what finally made it into the paper directly, but also (if you read and compare carefully), you might see ways in which they influenced my developing thinking about the data and helped me engage with it.

How this helps you

First, I hope that seeing some of these examples gives you some ideas, inspiration and reassurance about creating your initial notes and how they could or should look. We strongly recommend asking someone to review your work after you've coded your first transcript. Your supervisor or advisor is well placed to do this, but we've also done this for students.

We also cover exploratory noting in our IPA analysis 1 workshop (this does fill up really quickly). We do the same activity for reflexive thematic analysis in that workshop, too.  If the workshop is full or the time doesn't work for you, we can also review these activities during a 1:1.

Reference

Smith, J. A., Flowers, P., & Larkin, M. (2022). Interpretative phenomenological analysis: Theory, method and research (2nd ed.). SAGE.