At Transcription Centre we specialise in transcription of interviews, focus groups and speeches for academics and market researchers primarily in the UK.
Zoom have just updated their terms and conditions and there are some serious ethical concerns over how they’re intending on using the data i.e. the recordings you’re making on there of yourself and your respondents.
Click through to read more.
When people write up their research, the concept of turning the audio from interviews into text is very often simply described in the methodology as ‘the audio was transcribed’. This over-simplistic breakdown of the act of transcription is something that should be considered more by qualitative researchers.
This is a quick look at a few key points raised in a new article in a research methods special issue of the journal Voluntas. There is a link to the open access article, which we suggest you read.
We have a lot of experience in transcribing phone interviews and as technology has progressed over the last few years, it’s been easy to hear by the increasing overall quality of the recordings we receive. There is still very much a spectrum of recording methods however, so we thought it was a good time to share our experience of how to work best with your transcription company to get useful transcripts from these interviews.
It’s the most common refrain we see online related to people doing their own transcribing, or their reason for paying someone else to do the transcription they’ve been putting off.
A number of articles have been written on the phenomenon known as ‘voice confrontation’ and I’ll dig out some nuggets from them later on, but first I’d like to throw my own anecdote in…
A blog post based on a great Twitter conversation full of advice for preparing for and performing qualitative interviews. There are a lot of nuggets of wisdom in there.
The advice we’ve picked out is heavily slanted towards transcription, because we’re a transcription company.
Two transcripts of a small podcast series from The University of Leicester.
Here’s another infographic containing some very serious tips (and some not so serious pictures) on making a good recording, and a good impression on your interviewee.
We’ve all been in a conversation with someone who says, “Do you know what I mean?” at the end of every other sentence. Here we deal with how to handle that in the world of transcription.
Our founder/director has passed her PhD viva! With no corrections!
You may have seen on our website that you can choose between either 'full verbatim' or 'intelligent verbatim' transcripts, but what exactly do we mean by this?
Open access to published research is becoming more and more common, but what about the data behind the research? Why is it so important to be able to access researchers’ data and duplicate results, and what can be done to make this easier and more common practice?
I've transcribed a podcast from the National Centre for Research Methods called "Reproducing social science research: give up your code" where Professor Vernon Gayle of the University of Edinburgh is interviewed on this topic. It's a bit of a departure for us as it's more relevant for quant rather than qualitative research, but I thought it was interesting, so I decided to transcribe it and share!
One of the downsides to transcribing is that the constant typing can really damage your wrists if you don’t have your workstation set up properly. A few years ago, I started experiencing debilitating RSI. I had been typing almost entirely on my laptop for years, and realised that this (in addition to poor posture) was the source of my problems. I finally decided to take action and buy an ergonomic keyboard.
I'm a big fan of Graham Gibbs' YouTube videos, which cover a wide range of issues related to qualitative research and research methods. Previously, I've discussed his overview video on "Doing transcription for qualitative research". Today I'm looking at "Types of transcription for qualitative research", which looks more specifically at levels of verbatim and formatting for qualitative research transcripts.
If there's one thing I've become slightly obsessive about since starting to transcribe, it's correct punctuation. Nothing annoys me more than a misplaced apostrophe, missing comma, or misused quotation marks. This blog post - 10 common punctuation mistakes and how to avoid them - hits the nail on the head.
So you’ve just come back from a fieldwork trip, or you’ve got a long backlog of interviews that you’ve conducted for a qualitative research project. All of a sudden you realise you’ve got dozens of audio files, some field notes, some scraps of paper, and don’t even know where to begin on getting things organised to begin your qualitative analysis.
Through my own experience as a researcher, I have found myself in a situation where the sheer volume of data gathered can be a bit daunting, but being systematic from the beginning can help you feel a bit more in control. Here are five tips on getting started so that you can make the best of your data analysis.
Graham Gibbs at the University of Huddersfield has a number of very useful YouTube videos on research methods, particularly focusing on qualitative research. In this video, he discusses transcription for qualitative research and some of the issues involved in this.
"Given the nature of transcription, why do it? The reason we do it is because usually we find it much easier to work with a transcript rather than a recording. […] For analysis purposes, people still find it easier to work with a transcript, despite the effort that goes into creating transcripts. The reason has to do with the fact that you can move around transcripts – you can mark it with a pencil; you can shuffle the pages very quickly and find the bits you want. You’ve got very quick, random access to what you want. You can remember bits because you’ve marked them very easily. […] I’m afraid that transcription is still the norm for anything that involves interviews or recordings."
"What are key understandings and issues evident in the transcription literature between 1979 and 2009? and What are the implications of these for qualitative research?" This very interesting journal article seeks to answer these research questions, and illuminates some of the important aspects of transcription for qualitative researchers.
Abstract
Transcription is a practice central to qualitative research, yet the literature that addresses transcription presents it as taken for granted in qualitative studies. In this article the author provides a review of three decades of literature on transcription between 1979 and 2009. The review establishes core understandings and issues that have informed the transcription literature, including the ways it is said that transcription is overlooked in qualitative research. Discussion of the literature raises the need for more empirical studies that examine transcription in qualitative research, and suggests specific questions that qualitative researchers might address in relation to transcription and its reporting.
Davidson, Christina Rush. "Transcription: Imperatives for qualitative research." International Journal of Qualitative Methods 8.2 (2009): 35:52.
