Crowdsourced qualitative interview tips and nuggets of wisdom
On the 2nd of April a gentleman called Dr Matthew Donoghue published the following tweet.
The original tweet from Matt Donoghue: Qualitative methods people! I’m running a workshop for our students & postdocs soon on interviewing. Want to show the positive and negative sides! So, 2 questions: 1) What’s the 1 thing you wish you knew before entering the field? 2) What 1 piece of advice would you give?
The resulting conversation was incredibly useful and should be shared as widely as possible – I’ll stick a link to the initial tweet at the end of this article, add your own advice and retweet it!
We’ve decided that such a great thread shouldn’t be lost to the Twitter archives, so with permission from Dr Donoghue we’ve taken some of the best replies (at time of writing) and turned them into this blog post.
A lot of them are transcription-based, which is how the thread came to our attention in the first place, such as this tweet from Ben Campbell.
Tweet from Ben Campbell reading: Also practically- beg borrow or steal a good recording device. It will make transcription & anaylsis a lot less stressful than if you’re scrutinising tinny, echoey audio.
Which, as you probably already know, is a bit of a sensitive issue for us. We spend our days dealing with recordings and we’re happy to say that the majority of the audio we receive is decent quality. This is an area in which technology has caught up sufficiently that as long as you’re in a quiet space, the recording apps on most new(ish) smartphones are actually generally pretty good. But if you have access to a really good recording device from a colleague, friend or your institution, use it!
Replies to this particular tweet highlight the importance of knowing what format your device is recording in. This matters a lot. If you’re recording in .mp3, then you’ll be fine because they are universally playable and do not take up a huge amount of room on a drive. Other file types, such as .wav, are much bigger and could end up filling the memory card/internal storage of your device if you’re not instantly backing them up and deleting them from your recorder. If you need to share your audio with colleagues, it’s also a consideration – there’s often a limit to the size of email attachments (both sending and receiving).
There are some recorders where the default file type is proprietary such as Olympus’ .ds2/.dss/.DS2 – The latter of which (the capitalisation made the difference) has caused an issue for us here at Transcription Centre as we have received a couple of batches of audio that we could not convert, no matter what we tried. There is a setting on most devices which allows you to choose the format of the file recorded. Make sure you’re using one which is compatible with your own software and doesn’t fill up your storage.
Related to this topic is the issue of using a backup device to record the interview. Roz Surtees picks up on this in their tweet – as well as our favourite issue with hearing your own voice back. We’re working on a separate blog post dedicated to this phenomenon. Edit - here’s that post!
Three tweets, the first from Roz Surtees reads: 1) Transcription takes so much longer than you anticipated and hearing your own voice back can be weird but you get used to it. 2) If you can, record on 2 devices at the same time in case one runs out of batteries. There are lots of good (and free) apps available.
The second tweet is a reply to Roz from Matt Donoghue which reads: 2) Oh God, flashback to one of the first focus groups I ever did… lost about an hour’s worth of conversation.
The third tweet is Roz’s reply to Matt and reads: Nightmare- there’s no better way to ensure you don’t listen to what the interviewee is saying than to be worried about your batteries running out on your recorder.
Good advice, and the point about not listening properly because you’re worried about the batteries is not something we’d thought about before.
We do have caveats to this one if you’re using your phone as a backup recorder. You must make sure that it’s on airplane mode, otherwise you run the risk of ruining both recordings. Take it from us, the old ‘bip-du-de-bip-du-de-bip-du-de-bzzzzzz’ noise on your car stereo when a text message was arriving is nothing in comparison to what all of the data emitting from and being received by your phone will do to your primary recording device. Also, any notifications that make your phone vibrate on a hard surface are distracting in the room and ear-bustingly loud on the recording.
Tweet from Rebecca McPhillips which reads: Have a run through with a colleague or friend before the first interview - actually articulating questions can really improve the topic guide. Always remember that interviewing people, especially about personal issues, is a privilege, and give people time to think and respond.
This is a great idea from Rebecca – sometimes a question can look great on paper but when you come to ask it you realise that you’ve either inadvertently created a tongue twister, or you’re not actually asking the question you think you are. Having a sympathetic but critical audience for a dry run is excellent preparation. It’s better than having to follow up with someone to rephrase a couple of questions or running the risk of alienating your subject for the sake of an hour over a coffee with a friend.
Tweet from Kate Summers that reads: 2) Your research question(s) are not the same as your interview questions!!! - a tricky/creative process is transforming your academic puzzle/focus into a series of questions that make sense as a conversation and that access the phenomena you are interested in.
And:
Tweet from Michael Larkin that says: 2. Don’t do the second one until you have transcribed the first one, and discussed it with a supervisor or collaborator - they will notice things that you missed, and also put any ‘mistakes’ in perspective - it will help you to re-calibrate for round 2.
There are a few tips in the conversation that are close to our hearts, none more so than the first part of this one…
Tweet from Magdalena Mikulak, reading: Think about the location - transcribing with background noise is 10x harder. Back your files up securely. Ask follow up questions and focus on the conversation rather than getting through every single question on the topic guide. What you find interesting when you write will shift.
It should be recognised that if you’re recording something, it’s because someone is going to listen to it again. If that person is you and you’re transcribing your notes yourself then you’re going to fall out with your former self for thinking that Sainsbury’s cafe at 1pm was a suitable location to perform an interview. Often you have no option – and we get that – but if you’re paying someone to do the transcription for you (oh, hello) then you’re going to pay more if there’s a lot of background noise, because it takes longer to transcribe. You’re also running the risk of getting an inferior transcript because the work experience kid inevitably drops the bucket of dirty cutlery all over the floor just as your respondent was getting to the most useful part of an answer.
One tip that we added recently is about full verbatim. Do you need your transcript to be full verbatim? Our answer to this is: Unless your ego is bulletproof and/or you're undertaking discourse analysis – you probably don’t want or need full verbatim transcripts. If you have a hard time listening to your own voice then you're going to hate reading a transcript of exactly how you actually talk. More on the subject of ‘What is full verbatim?’ can be found here.
The whole conversation is very much worth reading. There are too many points in there to add to a blog post for a transcription company, but there may be a few nuggets from an experienced academic in there which will make a difference to how you conduct or prepare for your interviews.
Many thanks to Dr Donoghue for having the thought to ask the question in the first place. Twitter can be a depressing place at times, but there are humans in there trying to make a positive difference.
