Above is a shot of a Screenflow recording that I am making. I am beginning some coding 'training' videos that I plan to share with someone. Since I'm using actual data, I will not be sharing these on a larger scale. (If I was inclined to create some multi part - 'how to code according to me' course to post on YouTube [and I am not; there are plenty of those out there], I would use public domain data; there is plenty of that available.) I inserted the research questions into the document header - which is a bit of a variation on the 'use a sticky note' advice given by Ron Chenail (TQR Editor-in-Chief, Professor of family therapy, director of the qualitative research graduate certificate and holder of progressively more important administrative positions that I cannot keep track of at Nova Southeastern Uni) - but this worked for me. However, the point of this post is to bring up a recurring theme in my mind and in conversations I have had and continue to have with others - the value of doing your own data processing - specifically transcription. I will consider coding in another post. Once I started to record a running commentary to my coding, I had to think about what I was doing in more detail than usual - because I have to not just do it, but also to describe and rationalize it. This, in turn, made me think a lot more about what I was seeing. And one of the things that kept bothering me was that the transcriptionist (a pro) failed to identify who is speaking. I realize that focus groups (FG) are very hard to transcribe due to multiple people and overlap; this is one of the reasons that it is not my favorite approach. But the technique I applied when I first transcribed a FG was to find a piece of 'marker text' for each speaker, highlight and time stamp it, and return to it for comparison when I was uncertain about who was speaking. For what it's worth, I had the most difficulty with young female speakers; I found I could hear more variation in pitch among males.
In the interview I am working with, speaker identification is not of critical importance, although, unfortunately, in some instances, the transcriptionist also made no distinction when multiple moderators were present. Even though it is not a concern for this project, without member identification, I would suggest there is limited to no opportunity for any discourse analysis. This deficiency of course can occur regardless of who is doing the transcript, but I like to think that well-trained and thoughtful researchers will put more care into their work than the 'pay by the hour' or 'pay by page count' professionals. I also want to mention that it has been my experience that going through the painful (and it is still painful) process of transcribing your own interviews eventually leads to greater awareness of what you are saying (how it will sound, how it will feel to type it) in future interviews. I am fairly certain that I'm a bit less likely to digress or even be social during the interview now than I was a few years ago because I am keenly aware of how much more typing there will be for each minute of talk. (This said, I still have to keep the conversation flowing so I do not want to be too terse.) If you have, as I do, a tendency to want to fill in the empty spaces, you might find while you transcribe (as I have) that you did not necessarily clarify the question when you kept talking but sometimes you instead made things a little less clear which impacts the quality of your data. In summary, I think that repeated interviewing along with the time spent transcribing the interviews leaves a researcher with a better ability to step outside himself/herself during the interview and think about how it is going to sound in a recording and look on a page. This can be viewed in a positive way as a helpful form of self-evaluation that results in improved quality of data.
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AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
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