At Transcription Centre we specialise in transcription of interviews, focus groups and speeches for academics and market researchers primarily in the UK.
This is a question that I think all qualitative researchers struggle with - how many interviews do you need to produce adequate, meaningful evidence? As a transcription company, we've dealt with projects with five interviews, and others with hundreds. There are certainly a lot of questions to consider, and Sarah Baker and Rosalind Edwards' very useful working paper aims to address these. Rosalind was interviewed for an NCRM podcast about this paper, which we've transcribed below for you.
This video provides a really useful overview of how to conduct qualitative analysis, by manually coding transcripts. Personally, I prefer to code transcripts in NVivo, but these instructions are a great starting point to getting to grips with doing this manually. I've transcribed the video and included the text below, so you have the option of either watching or reading.
I've just read an interesting blog post - "Recording focus groups: An interview with Will Wright" discussing various technologies that he uses to record focus groups, which I found really interesting. It made me think about the way I’ve conducted and dealt with transcribing focus groups in the past.
As a transcriber, I have but one requirement when it comes to voice recorders: Please, oh please, produce perfect quality audio recordings so that I can understand exactly what every speaker is saying.
As a researcher, I have quite a few more requirements on my tick list. I've been using the Olympus WS-450S recorder for several years now, and it's worked brilliantly for my needs.
I started transcribing over seven years ago because my exceptionally fast typing (over 80 words per minute) makes me pretty well able to keep up with normal talking speed of recordings. I receive enquiries every day from people hoping to become transcribers, but many of these seem to be from people with a fairly poor grasp of English. I’ve realised over the years that there’s more to being a good transcriber than just lightning fast fingers and I thought I would share some key skills that I look for in my employees.
When I tell someone about audio transcription, invariably the first question I get asked is, "Why can't you just have voice recognition software do it?" Well, unfortunately your computer just isn't that smart (yet). Here are a few reasons why having audio transcription done by humans is so important for accuracy and quality.
