Interview Transcribing
Week 10
Iram Naz (Project Manager)
Learning outcomes
By the end of this session you will be
able to:
• Become familiar with transcribing steps
• Use transcribing time estimator to plan your time for
interviews etc
• Understand the rules of expanding on how to expand
on hand written notes
What is transcribing?
“ A Transcription is the conversion
a spoken-language source into
written, typewritten or printed
form.”
Transcribing
• An interview does not end after the
conversation.
• After coming up with good, relevant
questions, transcribing the interview is
also a challenging part.
• this process requires keen listening
skills, cautious and watchful editing
and a pocketful of patience
• Not a lot of literature on transcribing
process in research
What are the advantages of
transcribing interviews?
• A corrective to the limitations of intuition and recollection
• Enables repeated and detailed examination of the events
of the interaction
• Extends the range and precision of the observations that
can be made
• Permits other researchers to have direct access to the
data about which claims are being made
• Makes analysis potentially subject to detailed public
scrutiny
• Helps minimise the influence of personal preconception
or analytical bias
• Data can be re-used in other investigations and reexamined in the context of new findings.
Disadvantages of transcribing
• Time Consuming / Expensive if you outsource
• Most researchers who are competent typists and
transcribe their own interviews find it takes about
4 hours of transcribing time for each hour of
interview.
• This means work can pile up, especially for lone
researchers doing their own transcriptions.
• The only real advice here, albeit hard to follow,
is, if you can’t pay someone to do it for you,
keep transcribing“little and often”.
What happens to transcribed data?
• Manual analysis of interview transcripts using coding
• NVivo software allows researchers to code a transcript,
the program can retrieve all the coded passages about a
particular topic. If documents are transcribed you can
read the contents of these passages together, and
review the range of data coded there and code to finer
categories. This process of retrieving from documents all
the actual text that relates to the same idea and then
reviewing it in order to refine the coding or even to do
further coding is called ‘coding on’ and is a central and
important feature of qualitative data analysis programs
like NVivo.
Advantages of interviewer
transcribing
• If your data are field notes, almost certainly you are the only person
able to interpret them.
•
It gives the researcher a chance to start the data analysis.
• Careful listening to tapes or reading of your field notes along with
reading and checking of the transcripts produced means that you
become very familiar with their content.
• The content of the text is such that no-one else can do it. For
instance, the interviews may be about a highly technical subject or,
what is often the case with anthropological work, in a language very
few others can understand.
Tips for Transcribing Interviews
•
•
•
Summarise the conversation. If you interviewed a
person, you want to work on the summary as soon as
possible afterwards. Write down anything you
remember from the conversation.
Listen to the recording. Write down any key themes or
stories, or questions that were asked. Make sure to
write these in chronological order.
Type the conversation as is. Don't try to change an
interviewee's word choices or grammar. This will take
away from the authenticity of the interview.
Tips for Transcribing Interviews
•
•
•
Pause the recording every so often. By pausing, you
can think back on what you've already heard and write
down any general key points. You can also rewind to
repeat any passages you misunderstood or couldn't
hear.
Leave out phrases such as "um" or "uh". This could
make for clumsy reading within your report. Only use
words and phrases that best convey the conversation.
Use proper line spacing, paragraphs, quotation marks
and lower case and upper case letters. Format the
report as you would any professional work. If you
asked to provide the transcript for any reason, you'll be
able to do so quickly, without having to go back and
work on it further.
Tips for Transcribing Interviews
•
•
•
Place activities into brackets. If the phone
rings, type, [phone rings]. If there are
unintelligible parts of the conversation, add
[??] or [unclear].
Use dashes for pauses, interruptions and
incomplete sentences.
Go over the report with the interviewee. They
can help you to clarify any words, names,
places and other information. The interviewee
can also give you the go-ahead to use the
report.
Tips for Transcribing Interviews
• When typing up the interview, to add clarity, you can
add some clues/non verbal gestures to the tone of
the interview in brackets, (e.g. [laughs], [points at
arm]). Add these in either the first draft, or in the
second edit when re-listening to the tape.
Tips for Transcribing Interviews
• Editing is a tricky balancing act. A few simple edits
can totally change the tone of a piece, so it's
important to remain as true to the interview subject
as possible. Only edit out simple grammar mistakes
that happen during speech. If the subject's answer is
ambiguous, don't try to clarify. Let the reader judge
for themselves what they meant. If you have an
opinion, express it in accompanying text, not by
altering the interviewee's words.
Tips for Transcribing Interviews
• Words are harsher in print, so editing and adding
context afterwards can help present your subject in
the correct light. Read over the final copy and make
sure that your interview subject doesn't end up
sounding more extreme or less articulate than they
are in real life.
Useful website and tools
Transcribing your own data Toolkit (University of Manchester)
http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/realities/resources/toolkits/
transcribing-your-data/08-toolkit-transcribing-your-qual-data.pdf
Download a quick transcribing planning calculator
http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/realities/resources/toolkits/
transcribing-your-data/08-transcription-planning-calculator.xls
Further Reading
•
Arksey, H. and Knight, P. (1999) Interviewing for Social Scientists, London: Sage.
•
Bell, J. (1993) Doing Your Research Project, 2nd edn. Buckingham: Open University Press.
•
Cohen, L. and Manion, L. (2000) Research Methods in Education5th edn, London,
RoutledgeFalmer.
•
.
•
Holstein, J. and Gubrium, J. (1995) The Active Interview, London: Sage.
•
Riley, J. (1990) Getting the Most from your Data: a handbook of practical ideas on how to analyse
your qualitative data, Bristol, Technical and Educative Services Ltd
•
Rubin, H. and Rubin, I. (1995) Qualitative Interviewing: the art of hearing data, London: Sage
•
Wellington, J. (2000) Educational Research: contemporary issues and practical approaches,
London: Continuum.
•
Woods, P. (1986) Inside schools: ethnography in educational research, London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Radnor, H. (1994) ‘Collecting and Analysing Interview Data’, in Educational Research Monograph
Series, No. 3. Exeter, University of Exeter.
Any Questions?