Structured Interview

Transcribing interviews

Before you get started with transcription, decide whether to conduct verbatim transcription or intelligent verbatim transcription.

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  If pauses, laughter, or filler words like “umm” or “like” affect your analysis and research conclusions, conduct verbatim transcription and include them.
  
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  If not, you can conduct intelligent verbatim transcription, which excludes fillers, fixes any grammatical issues, and is usually easier to analyze.
  

TipIf you’re able to type quickly, consider increasing the speed of your recordings to 1.25 or 1.5. This can speed up the transcription process substantially.
If your research budget allows it, you can use transcription software. However, you should double-check the transcriptions against the audio prior to moving to the coding stage.
Transcribing presents a great opportunity for you to cleanse your data. Here, you can identify and address any inconsistencies or questions that come up as you listen.
Your supervisor might ask you to add the transcriptions to the appendix of your paper.

Coding semi-structured interviews

Next, it’s time to conduct your thematic or content analysis. This often involves “coding” words, patterns, or recurring responses, separating them into labels or categories for more robust analysis.
Due to the open-ended nature of many semi-structured interviews, you will most likely be conducting thematic analysis, rather than content analysis.

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  You closely examine your data to identify common topics, ideas, or patterns. This can help you draw preliminary conclusions about your participants’ views, knowledge or experiences.
  

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  After you have been through your responses a few times, you can collect the data into groups identified by their “code.” These codes give you a condensed overview of the main points and patterns identified by your data.
  

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  Next, it’s time to organize these codes into themes. Themes are generally broader than codes, and you’ll often combine a few codes under one theme. After identifying your themes, make sure that these themes appropriately represent patterns in responses.
  

TipIf you encounter problems with the themes you’ve set, consider splitting them up, combining them, or discarding them, so they are as useful and accurate as possible.