Analyzing Qualitative Data. Graham R Gibbs

      Chapter Two Data Preparation

      Contents

      Objectives

      After reading this chapter, you should:

      Transcription

      Most qualitative researchers transcribe their interview recordings, observations and field notes to produce a neat, typed copy. They do this because they find it much easier to work with textual transcriptions of their recordings. Now that most recordings are digital there is very good software to play them, but even so, it is usually easier to navigate around a transcript and mark it with notes, ideas, etc. This is particularly important in the process of analysis when you are reading, re-reading and cross-referencing the text many times. Trying to find the point in an interview transcript where you remember the respondent made some important comment is hard enough when you have many pages to look through. But a quick glance at the transcript and your memory of the sequence of discussion will often enable you to home in quickly to the comments you are looking for. All this is much harder and slower to do when working with audio or video files.

      However, there are two big issues to bear in mind before undertaking transcriptions: they take a lot of time and effort to do, and transcription is an interpretive process. Estimates of the time transcripts take vary from author to author and depend on what level of detail you transcribe and how talented the typist is. A common figure is that even the most straightforward transcribing takes somewhere between four to six times as long as it takes to collect the data. This means work can pile up, especially for the lone researcher doing their own transcription. Many PhD students using qualitative methods have experienced the anxiety brought on in the later stages of their fieldwork by the growing ‘pile’ of recordings and notes waiting to be transcribed. 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’.

      Transcription, especially of interviews, is a change of medium and that introduces issues of accuracy, fidelity and interpretation. Kvale (1988, p. 97) warns us to ‘beware of transcripts’. There are, he suggests, dangers, when moving from the spoken context of an interview to the typed transcript, such as superficial coding, decontextualization, missing what came before and after the respondent’s account, and missing what the larger conversation was about. As we shall see later, this change of medium is associated with certain kinds of errors that researchers must watch out for. One response here is to go back to the recording to check your interpretations in the transcript. You may find that hearing the voice makes the meaning clearer and even suggests different interpretations. Furthermore, most transcripts only capture the spoken aspects of the interview and miss out the setting, context, body language and general ‘feel’ of the session. Mishler (1991) suggests a parallel between a transcript and a photograph. A photograph is one, frozen, framed, printed and edited version of reality. The same is true of a transcript. The issue is not whether the transcript is, in a final sense, accurate, but rather whether it represents a good, careful attempt to capture some aspects of the interview. There is always an issue of how to convert speech into written text. Very few people speak in grammatical prose, so the researcher needs to decide how much of what is in the recording needs to be transcribed. As we shall see later there are several options here, though we have to recognize that the transcript will never be completely accurate.

      A similar point can be made about the move from handwritten notes taken during interviews or during fieldwork. Transcription here usually involves a process of ‘writing up’ the notes. This is a creative activity and not just a mechanical reproduction. It involves expressing the notes as ideas, observations of certain kinds and so on, and represents the start of data analysis as well. I will discuss these issues in more detail in the next chapter.

      Reasons for transcribing

      It is not necessary to transcribe all or even any of the information you have collected in your project in order to analyze it. Some levels and forms of analysis can be done quite productively without any copy of the interviews, texts or observations you have collected or recorded. In fact, some researchers advocate analyzing directly from an audio or video recording. Of course, this will involve taking notes on the content you hear or see and probably going through the recordings several times. Doing it this way you are more likely to focus on the bigger picture and not get bogged down in the details of what people have said. This is fine for some types of analysis, such as policy research and evaluation research, where you are working with very clear theories about the situation and therefore have a good idea what you are looking for and can afford to be selective with the data. But for most approaches, and especially for discourse and conversation analysis, a detailed transcript is a necessity. It forces you to listen carefully to what was recorded and to look carefully at your notes, and it provides you with an easily readable version that can be copied as many times as necessary. Having a transcript also makes it easier to work in a team, where tasks have to be shared and there has to be good agreement about the interpretation of the data. A typescript means everyone can read the texts and everyone can have a copy.

      Strategies for transcribing interviews

      There are various strategies you can adopt when transcribing. You could, for example, only transcribe parts of the recording. For the rest, you could just take notes