ESRC Methods Festival Open Access Qualitative Data Analysis Software 18th July 2006 Transparent Transcription? Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College University of London

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 2 Outline Thinking about transcribing? Using Transcriber Moving from Transcriber to Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) software: NVivo

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 3 Before we begin... Write down what you thinktranscription is in the context of social science research. 30 seconds:

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 4 Transcribing: From What to What? What epistemological claims are you making when you transcribe? –Representing in textual form an audiovisual representation of observation or interaction. –Whats your take on realism v interpretivism? Lapadat (2000) Listening to what? –Interviews, focus groups or naturally occurring talk? Field notes? How has this been recorded – just audio or video too? –Does that give you more information to select from? Purpose: to make amenable to analysis. Requires some degree of condensation and abstraction. –Dont mask this – explain why you select what you do. –BE REFLEXIVE!

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 5 Transcribing - Mechanics Do it yourself: –Transcribe cassettes in full: foot-pedal control or auto-rewind –Use Transcriber to tie your transcription to the sound files clause by clause – cp sub-titles. –Both pre-suppose a fully able-bodied researcher Grundy et al (2003) – hearing impaired researcher Have someone else create your transcriptions: –Financial cost –Makes need for explicit instructions obvious – any different? –Impact on transcriptionist – Tilly (2003) – co-participation Transcription not a neutral process: –Decisions constrain your analysis –Report and discuss them – BE REFLEXIVE!

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 6 Transcribing – Level of Detail Do you need complete transcriptions? Summaries in Word or NVivo (with labelled proxy document) – partial transcription. –Useful first step – in field and for familiarisation –Could create hybrid data – different analytical tools needed (van der Veen, 2006). How much information can you encode textually? It is not simply a matter of the more detail, the better; using a transcript that is more detailed than one needs is like giving a few unnecessary decimal places on ones statistics. (Macnaghten and Meyers, 2004: 74) What do you need to explore your research questions? –Seale and Silverman (1997) - different levels of detail in transcribing a medical interview enabled different interpretations to be made.

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 7 First Steps with Transcriber Transcriber enables you to create your transcriptions while following your sound files on screen. Start Transcriber: you will be prompted to open an audio file – WAV or mp3 Click on the play button and youll hear it.

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 8 Transcriber window with new file open Sound file as wave form Transcription area Play buttons

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 9 Next Steps with Transcriber While playing your audio file, when theres a pause, press Enter and youll create a segment break. When finished select Signal | Playback Mode | Loop on Segment – this enables you to replay each segment while youre transcribing it. Press Tab to stop and start it and the up and down arrows to move between segments. When finished set back to continuous playback: Signal | Playback Mode |.. Continuous playback Create a new speaker: Segmentation | Create turn or Crtl-T Double-click the rose coloured buttons to enter a description. When finished File | Save as... –This will create a file with the same name as the audio file (by default), but with the extension *.trs.

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 10 Transcriber window with sound file fully transcribed Colour coded transcription aligned with sound file Report heading Speaker heading Segments of transcription

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 11 Moving Transcriptions to NVivo Before you start Transcriber you m ust ensure have NVivoTxt.tcl installed in C:\Program Files\DGA & LDC\Transcriber\converter File | Export | Export to NVivo Plain Text format. –This will create a plain text file with the same name as the sound file you are working on – except with a.txt ending.

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 12 Example Transcript Exported from Transcriber {T}brief-bbc-buchanan {D}Description: Report on BBC Radio Four's Today programme - August {D}Transcribed by Duncan Branley (using Transcriber {D}Elapsed time of recording shown at start of each turn in minutes and seconds. {H1}Ordaining gay priests? {H2}Emily Buchanan {P}(0:0 - 0:7 = 0:7 duration) So individual Provinces can still go on er practicing how they have been and perhaps even ordaining gay priests. {H1}Church Split? {H2}John Humphries {P}(0:7 - 0:11 = 0:4 duration) So it's not going to divide the Church, {P}[squeals] {P}{Drops coffee} it's not going to split the Church fatally? {H2}Emily Buchanan + John Humphries {P}(0:11 - 0:20 = 0:8 duration) {P}(music starts) {H3}Speaker 1 No I mean the fact that Conference has now voted overwhelmingly in favour of this final resolution so the Church has stayed together. {H3}Speaker 2 It is {P}(music ends) {P}(shh other starts) {H3}Speaker 1... a compromise. {H3}Speaker 2

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 13 Importing into NVivo The characters in curly brackets {~} are tags which NVivo can recognise: –{T} – Document title –{D} – Document description –{Hn} – different heading styles –{P} – Plain text You can import this file into NVivo 2 and the text marked with these styles will be recognised. Create a new document by importing this file – using the 'Read marked-up title and description paragraphs' option.

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 14 Automatically Coding in NVivo NVivo can see document structure. NVivo can use this to code for each turn-taker. Can use for structured, semi- structured and unstructured interviews. Document formatted with Heading styles

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 15 Section Coding by Title in NVivo (1) 1.Open the Document Explorer. 2.Highlight the All Documents folder, a Set or a single document. 3.From the menu bar select Set | Code Documents by Section… or Document | Code by Section… These both bring up the Section Coder. 4.You have two options – choose one or other: a.Code sections into Tree Nodes using section numbers as addresses b.Code sections by title

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 16 Section Coding by Title in NVivo (2) 5.You then have to nominate the Parent Tree Node. You can either type it in or navigate to it by selecting the Choose button which brings up the Choose Node… dialog a.If you already have a node in mind, then simply navigate to it. b.If you need to create one, you an do so by clicking on the Create Node button (the button with the lined star). This creates a Tree Node with a default name of Tree Node (n). c.Click on the Properties button to change the name and add a description. Click OK when finished. d.Whichever method you have used, the node will appear in the box at the bottom of the Choose Node dialog box. Click OK. 6.The node will now appear in the box labelled Parent Tree Node (see previous slide). Click OK and section coding will begin: a progress bar will appear until it is completed.

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 17 Transcriber: Further Details Further details about using Transcriber with NVivo can be found at Guidance on using it with a similar piece of software called Atlas-TI can be found in Alan Stockdales detailed guide An approach to recording, transcribing, and preparing audio data for qualitative analysis available as a PDF from

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 18 Free Software: FreeZip When downloading free software you might need to be able to decompress a zip file –A compressed file may contain one or many files and is used to reduce download times over the internet and normally ends in *.zip. If you dont already have such a programme, try the free utility FreeZip:

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 19 Free Software: Transcriber Transcriber is free to download and use. For Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP the latest easily installable version is Ensure you select the BINARY version to download otherwise you will have to install the components separately. To install, double-click the Transcriber Windows.exe file you have downloaded and follow the instructions. You need to accept the licence agreement, the default installation location and all the other defaults and it will be ready for you to use. Transcriber is also available for Macs and computers running Linux.

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 20 Free Software: NVivo export file for Transcriber You can download an NVivo Export file which enables you to produce plain text files with headings tagged from the transcriptions you create within Transcriber from Before starting Transcriber save it in C:\Program Files\DGA & LDC\Transcriber\converter –If you installed Transcriber in a different location from the default, please change appropriately.

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 21 References 1 Charles Antaki, Michael Billig, Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter (2002) Discourse Analysis Means Doing Analysis: A Critique Of Six Analytic Shortcomings Discourse Analysis Online paper.html Duncan Branley (2004) Making and Managing Audio Recordings in Clive Seale (ed) Researching Society and Culture (2nd edition): Sage, London pp Alan Bryman (2001) Social Research Methods (Oxford: OUP) Judith Green, Maria Franquiz and Carol Dixon (1997) The myth of the objective transcript TESOL Quarterly, 31 (1) Annabelle L Grundy, Dawn E Pollon and Michelle K McGinn (2003) The participant as transcriptionist: Methodological advantages of a collaborative and inclusive research practice International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2 (2). Article 3. html/grundyetal.html

© Duncan Branley Goldsmiths College, University of London 22 References 2 Judith C Lapadat (2000) Problematizing transcription: Purpose, paradigm and quality International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 3 (3), Phil Macnaghten and Greg Meyers (2004) Focus Groups in Clive Seale et al Qualitative Research Practice (London: Sage) Clive Seale, Giampietro Gobo, Jaber F Gubrium and David Silverman (2004) Qualitative Research Practice (London: Sage) Clive Seale and David Silverman (1997) Ensuring Rigour in Qualitative Research European Journal of Public Health 7(4) Susan A Tilley (2003) Transcription work: learning through co-participation in research practices International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE), Nov/Dec 16 (6) Jon van der Veen (2006) Lost in Transcription: Oral and Textual Readings of Interviews from Bruce County. Online working paper: