What do qualitative researchers need to know about transcription?
Are you thinking enough about the role of transcription in your research?
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.
Our founder and erstwhile director, Dr Caitlin McMullin, has published an article in a special issue of Voluntas on qualitative methods in third sector research. Here’s a link to the article. And here’s the abstract:
While there is a vast literature that considers the collection and analysis of qualitative data, there has been limited attention to audio transcription as part of this process. In this paper, I address this gap by discussing the main considerations, challenges and implications of audio transcription for qualitative research on the third sector. I present a framework for conducting audio transcription for researchers and transcribers, as well as recommendations for writing up transcription in qualitative research articles.
The article focuses on the need for transcription to be considered as a key part of the qualitative data collection and analysis. The fact that a lot of subjective decision-making goes into the transcription of audio interview files means that a qualitative researcher needs to reflect on the process a lot more when writing about methodology.
At a minimum, researchers should include who transcribed the data as part of a commitment to ethical and transparent qualitative research. Also, it is important to include what type of transcription was performed (intelligent verbatim or full verbatim) and what considerations went into the style choice. The section in which the author deals with the potential stigmatisation of specific persons or groups of people by presenting a full verbatim transcript – including (necessarily for the style) repetition and mis-speaking, slang, colloquialisms, and accents – is particularly key.
More detail on the distinction between full verbatim and intelligent verbatim transcription can be found in this blog post.
This write up is intended to be a very quick post to alert you to the existence of the article as we believe it contains some important advice that will help to enhance the level of transparency and accuracy in your research.
The article also talks about ways that researchers can work with transcription companies to ensure accuracy, a separate blog post will be written about these considerations as a deeper dive will be needed.
We’re very happy to help you to get the best data out of your research, we’ll do our best to answer any questions you have about transcription and qualitative research in general, get in touch. And check out our other blog posts which contain advice on performing and recording interviews.
