Physics bridge programs are designed to widen doctoral pathways for students, yet little is known about how participants’ community-rooted resources intersect with their emerging physics identities. Guided by Yosso’s conceptualization of community cultural wealth and critical adaptations of the physics identity construct, we are conducting a secondary analysis of eight semi-structured interviews with graduate students drawn from four bridge programs for the purposes of completing a quantitative ethnography study. In this paper, we discuss with transparency our decision-making and activities in the collection, segmentation, and codification stages of this study. In particular, our aim is to elucidate the initial steps of the quantitative ethnography process for new comers to the field who—like us—are trying to design a study that is guided by framework.