One of the themes that I explore in Mixed Methods: Interviews, Surveys, and Cross-Cultural Comparisons is the processes of data transformations that take place after an interview is completed. These include working from the audio- or video-recording through a series of layered transcriptions that serve various analytic purposes. By clicking on the audio file below, you will hear a short excerpt of an interview taken from Excerpt 4:1 on page 71 of the published text.
Verbatim Transcription:
A somewhat straightforward verbatim transcription captures the lexical content of the interview, and may provide the basis for thematic coding. The following is a content coded transcript of the audio file above. (PAR is the participant; INT is the interviewer).
PAR: So there’s always one primary family member that has the responsibility of taking on grandma, and then the other siblings come, and they see grandma, and grandma’s telling them stories about “Baby, remember back when you graduated, when we did this,” and what have you, in finite detail, and then, that elder or senior might say, “Ah, but you know, uh, Teresa did not feed me today” and the other siblings are going “what?” you know, (laughs) (INT: And Teresa’s in the corner going…) Teresa’s in the corner saying, “No, not true!” you know, and so, it’s a lot of….sometimes it brings about a lot of dissension in families.
Interactional Transcription
An interactional transcription aims at greater linguistic detail and captures intonation (prosody), the messiness of real speech (false starts, truncated words, overlaps between speakers, and abrupt changes in thread), and paraverbals (e.g. laughter, sobs) and gestures. The interactional transcript of the above audio file is as follows. (Transcription conventions can be found on page 72 of the text. PAR is the participant; INT is the interviewer).
12 PAR: so >there’s always one primary family member
13 that has the responsibility of taking on grandma<
14 .hh and then the other siblings come=
15 and ↑they see grandma
16 and grandma’s telling them stories about
17 ↑baby ↑remember back when you ↑graduated
18 .h when we did this and ↑what have you(.)
19 in finite detail .hh and then that sibl- (.)
20 that=that elder or senior might say (.)
21 eh but you ↑know (.) uh (.)
22 Teresa did not feed me ↓today
23 =and the other siblings are going
24 ↑what= you ↓know (laughs)]
25 INT: And Teresa’s in the corner saying=
26 PAR: =Teresa’s in the corner saying
27 ↑no not true=you know and so it’s a lot of uh
28 sometimes it brings about
29 a lot of ↓dissension in families
Again, the published text provides an interpretation of these lines. The conventions for this last kind of transcription have become highly standardized in disciplines such as conversation analysis, ethnomedology, and discursive psychology. For explanations and tutorials of such transcription, see:
An Introduction to Conversation Analysis (Charles Antaki, Loughborough University)