Making your life easier by outsourcing your research interview transcription
When you embark on a degree – whether it be undergraduate or postgraduate – in most cases part of your course will require a dissertation or thesis to be produced. This document is effectively a long essay, somewhere in the region of 80,000 to 100,000 words in length, the content of which you have researched and produced yourself. With the support of your tutor you will be expected to conduct independent research, discuss your findings and show that you have mastered your chosen subject.
In some cases, an element of this research may be conducting interviews (either one to one or group interviews) or running focus group sessions, which you will then analyse to support your research. Or you could also have webinars or conferences from which you’re extracting important information. Converting this recorded information into written form is essential to make it easier to work through the content. This is because it’s much simpler to work with a transcript than a recording – you can read or skim parts of the text, identify what people have said and make notes, easily identify keywords and generally work around the context of the interview more easily.
The fact is that because most theses and dissertations are still submitted in text form, quotes or references from your research will need to be in text form within the document too.
Transcription is a time consuming business – we’ve touched in on this before. When you’re not an experienced transcriber working through the interview and typing it up takes you away from the core work of actually producing the final thesis or dissertation and can be a huge investment of your time that would be better spent elsewhere. Quite simply, getting a transcription agency such as FSTL involved will save you a significant amount of time – time that’s better spent on your thesis. With the standard transcription time estimated at being anywhere from three to eight times the length of the recording, getting a professional transcriber involved means your document is produced much more quickly and accurately.
By changing the content from spoken to written form, those who aren’t practised in transcription could also be at risk of removing the context. At FSTL we are experts in providing transcripts that exactly convey the full experience using intelligent verbatim transcription. Our transcribers will use their experience to include repetitions, ‘erms’ and ‘you knows’ and other irrelevant conversation where necessary to create an accurate picture of how the interview ran, but at the same time making the transcription document readable. Our transcribers have excellent listening skills that enable them to recognise the individual speakers on the recording, even if there are multiple speakers, and spot commonly used terminology and abbreviations. And naturally all of this is completed confidentially and securely.
All we need from you to deliver these fantastic results is a good quality recording. We will then provide you with a working document that’s accurate for you to easily work with.