Audit Trail
A documented record of a study's decisions, procedures, and materials that lets others trace how the findings were produced.
An audit trail is a running record of a study's decisions and materials: raw data, notes on sampling and recruitment, coding schemes and their revisions, memos, and the reasoning behind analytic choices. Its purpose is to make the path from data to findings traceable, so that another researcher, or an examiner, could review how conclusions were reached. The concept supports the dependability and confirmability of qualitative work.
For a thesis, an audit trail is easiest to build as you go: date your memos, keep versions of your codebook, and log key decisions with reasons. This material feeds directly into the methodology chapter and appendices, and it protects you in the defense when you are asked exactly how a particular theme was derived.
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