than this. They aim at a transcribed text that looks like normal text and is a good copy of the words that were used. This may seem straightforward, but even here there are decisions to be made. Continuous speech is very rarely in well-constructed sentences. Speakers stop one line of thought in mid-sentence and often take up the old one again without following the grammatical rules used in writing. And there are all kinds of features that aren’t often captured by written prose (see Box 2.1). You may therefore be tempted to ‘tidy up’ their speech. Whether you should do this depends on the purpose of your study. Tidy, grammatical transcripts are easier to read and hence analyze. If your study is not much concerned with the details of expression and language use and is more interested in the factual content of what is said, then such tidying up is acceptable. On the other hand it clearly loses the feel for how respondents were expressing themselves and if that is significant in your study you will need to try and capture that in the transcription. The downside is that it makes the actual typing more difficult to do. A similar dilemma arises when respondents speak with a strong accent or use dialect. The most common practice here is to preserve all the dialect words and regional terms and grammatical expressions, but not to try to capture the actual sound of the accent by changing the spelling of the words. Keeping to a standard and consistent spelling is important if you are going to use the search functions in software to help with the analysis (see Chapter 8). It is harder to find all the text you are looking for if you haven’t spelled terms consistently. This is important if you are going to use computer searching. Box 2.2 gives some examples of different transcription styles.
BOX 2.1 Conversational features
Abbreviations (e.g. isn’t, aren’t, weren’t, could’ve, I’d, she’s, he’d, I’m, you’re, they’ve, we’ll, don’t, haven’t, that’s, ’cause, something’s, who’s) – sometimes spelt out by transcribers.
Verbal tics, like ‘er’, ‘um’, ‘erm’ – often ignored, but others such as ‘like’, ‘y’know’ and ‘sort of’ usually get included.
Pauses – either cut or shown simply by three dots (…).
Repetitions (for example, ‘What I mean … I mean … what I want to say is … I mean that is a real problem’) – might simply be rendered as ‘That is a real problem’.
(adapted from Arksey and Knight, 1999, p. 146)
BOX 2.2 Examples of different levels of transcription
Just the gist
90% of my communication is with … the Sales Director. 1% of his communication is with me. I try to be one step ahead, I get things ready … because he jumps from one … project to another … This morning we did Essex, this afternoon we did BT, and we haven’t even finished Essex yet.
(… indicates omitted speech)
Verbatim
I don’t really know. I’ve a feeling that they’re allowed to let their emotions show better. I think bereavement is part of their religion and culture. They tend to be more religious anyway. I’m not from a religious family, so I don’t know that side of it.
Verbatim with dialect
Well … first time I were with … I was still at school, I were fifteen … an’ … me brother ’ad gone into army … and me mum and dad said that it wasn’t workin’ out, me livin’ at ’ome … an’ … I don’t know … really I don’t why they kicked me out, but they did and I ended up livin’ with me cousin.
Discourse level
Bashir: Did you ever (.) personally assist him with the writing of his book. (0.8)
Princess: A lot of people .hhh ((clears throat)) saw the distress that my life was in. (.) And they felt (.) felt it was a supportive thing to help (0.2) in the way that they did.
(from Silverman, 2004, p. 208)
In some cases, for example if you are undertaking a discourse analysis or a conversation analysis, a very detailed transcription is necessary. Not only is natural speech often non-grammatical (at least by written conventions) but it is also full of other phenomena. People hesitate, they stress words and syllables, they overlap their speech with others and they raise and lower both volume and pitch in order to add meaning to what they are saying. If you need to record these features then there are various transcription conventions you can follow. One of the most widely used is the Jefferson system (see Atkinson and Heritage, 1984) and a similar system can be found in Silverman (2004, p. 367; see also Rapley, 2018, and Brinkmann and Kvale, 2018).
Doing the Transcription
The researcher
The choice of who should do the transcription usually comes down to either you, the researcher, or someone else who is paid to do it. Despite the nature of the activity, which can be tedious, especially if you are not a good touch typist, there are advantages to doing your own transcription. Most importantly, it gives you a chance to start the data analysis. Careful listening to recordings and reading and checking of the transcript you have produced means that you become very familiar with the content. Inevitably you start to generate new ideas about the data. Nevertheless, researchers usually do their own transcription because they have no choice. They have no funds to employ an audio typist or the content of the recording means that no one else can do it. For instance, the interviews may be about a highly technical subject or, as is often the case with anthropological work, in a language very few others can understand.
Nowadays, most people making recordings of interviews, focus groups, etc., will use digital recorders, either digital audio recorders or digital video cameras. Good-quality digital recorders are not cheap, but you might find that your department has machines that you can borrow. The same is true of video cameras. Most audio recorders and video cameras record onto removable memory cards. These can be played back on the recorder itself, or, for a much better reproduction can be transferred (by card reader or USB cable) to a computer. However, these days most people have their own digital audio recorder and camera in the form of a smartphone (cell phone). Although the microphones on these are not of the best quality, they will produce very usable quality recordings for simple interviews carried out in quiet surroundings. The one thing to watch out for with smartphones is that some have limited internal memory and no ability to use removable memory cards, so you need to make sure you have enough spare memory to make the recordings you need. In most cases all these devices will record the digital files in MP3 format. This is a compressed format and produces small file sizes, but is still very good quality (the same as used typically in podcasts). Audio recorders and smartphones using downloadable apps can also record to uncompressed WAV files. These are much better quality (similar to CD quality), but tend to be ten times the size of MP3 files. However, because the quality is much better, if you are recording in noisy environments or recording focus group discussions then it might be a good idea to use this format (of course, making sure you have enough memory left to make the recording). Actually, in these kinds of testing situations it might be best to use an audio recorder, as these have very good quality built-in microphones, or think about using an external microphone on your smartphone.
Don’t try to transcribe directly from the recorder. Transfer the files to a computer first (this gives you a second copy and is good for security reasons too). Then use software to play the files. There
