The purpose of this memo is to help you examine your goals, experiences, assumptions, feelings, and values as they relate to your research, and to discover what resources and potential concerns your identity and experience may create. What prior connections (social and intellectual) do you have to the topics, people, or settings you plan to study? How do you think and feel about these topics, people, or settings? What assumptions are you making, consciously or unconsciously, about these? What do you want to accomplish or learn by doing this study?

The purpose of this exercise is not to write a general account of your goals, background, and experiences. Instead, identify those goals and experiences, and the beliefs and emotions that connect to these that are most relevant to your planned research, and reflect on how these have informed and influenced your research. See Examples 2.2, 2.3, and 2.4 for some of the things you can do with such a memo—not as models to mechanically follow, but as illustrations of the kind of thinking that this memo requires. If you are just starting your project, you can’t be as detailed or confident in your conclusions as some of as some of these researchers are, but try to aim for this sort of exploration of how your identity and goals could affect your study.

The memo is intended to be mainly for your benefit, not for communicating to someone else; try to avoid substituting presentation for reflection and analysis. I suggest that you begin working on this memo by “brainstorming” whatever comes to mind when you think about your prior experiences that may relate to your site or topic, and jot these down without immediately trying to organize or analyze them. Then, try to identify the issues most likely to be important in your research, think about the implications of these, and organize your reflections.

Below are two broad sets of questions that it is productive to reflect on in this memo. In your answers to these, try to be as specific as you can.

1. What prior experiences have you had that are relevant to your topic or setting? What assumptions about your topic or setting have resulted from these experiences? What goals have emerged from these, or have otherwise become important for your research? How have these experiences, assumptions, and goals shaped your decision to choose this topic, and the way you are approaching this project?

2. What potential advantages do you think the goals, beliefs, and experiences that you described have for your study? What potential disadvantages do you think these may create for you, and how might you deal with these?

Some reflections to get you started…
1. The thing I am most excited about in my study is…
2. My main hope for this study is…
3. The main thing I am afraid of in doing this study is…
4. The biggest assumption I am making in my research is…
5. The main way that this research draws on my own experience is…
6. One thing I’m sure of about what’s going on is…
7. I would be really surprised if ___ is not going on.