How To Analyze Interview Transcripts In Qualitative Research
Qualitative research is a critical part of any successful study. Unlike quantitative data, a qualitative analysis adds color to academic and business reports. Interview transcripts are among the best qualitative analysis resources availablebut you need the right methods to use them successfully.
As weve observed, interviews are crucial to getting less measurable data from direct sources. They allow researchers to provide relatable stories and perspectives, and even quote important contributors directly. Lots of qualitative data from interviews allows authors to avoid embellishment and maintain the integrity of their content as well.
As a researcher, you need to make the most of recorded interviews. Interview transcripts allow you to use the best qualitative analysis methods. Plus, you can focus only on tasks that add value to your research effort.
Focused Coding / Selective Coding
With Focused coding, you create a finalized set of codes and categories from your first coding pass . You then re-code the data according to this final code list with the intent to not deviate from it. In comparison to an initial open coding pass which allows for emergent and changing codes, focused coding is a method where you dont intend to change the code list any further.
Then Add The Intangibles: Emotion Emphasis And Other Contextual Clues
As Hareth Al-Janabi points out, a tag can be anything, as long as it relates to the research question.
For many researchers, that means noting the subtext and emotion captured in a subjects response, or finding the thematic tags that help quantify some of the deeper themes. Elan Stouffer looks for signs of surprise, confusion, or frustration. Hell also make a note if someone liked or disliked something, or if they had a strong emotional reaction.
Erika Spear says this is where the third element of Owens method comes in: forcefulness. Forcefulness requires you to evaluate emotional engagement during the interview process, she says. Some powerful stories could be short, or only appear once in your data, but the forcefulness gives it weight.
But reading the subtext doesnt just mean logging emotion. Sara McGuyer has developed an intricate system for flagging non-verbal elements: I add notations for things like the source or quality of the data point. If a quote came from my fifth interview, I’ll tag that. If an item is repeated frequently, I’ll make a note of the strength of repetition. Or an exclamation point to note I am making an inference about something. Some research may require a different kind of coding, and I think it’s ok to devise your own system.
Tagging can be a good tool to help flatten insights and communicate data to stakeholdersbut it can also help teams understand data at a new level, Product and UX Designer Hannah Wei emphasizes.
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What Types Of Coding Exist
There are 2 approaches to coding qualitative data: inductive and deductive. Youre probably familiar with these terms, but lets do a quick recap. If you have a set of ideas and assumptions that guide your research you can develop preliminary coding categories and search for them in your interview data. This way, youre testing theory and thus using a deductive coding approach.
On the other hand, if you start your coding process from scratch and aim to identify themes to create a theory youre using inductive coding. No matter which approach youre using, the coding procedure remains largely the same.
S In A Thematic Analysis
Analysis involves a constant moving back and forward between the entire data set, the coded extracts of data that you are analysing, and the analysis of the data that you are producing. Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, Authors and qualitative researchers in psychology
Thematic analysis describes an iterative process as to how to go from messy data to a map of the most important themes in the data. The process contains six steps:
Familiarize yourself with your data.
Assign preliminary codes to your data in order to describe the content.
Search for patterns or themes in your codes across the different interviews.
Review themes.
In this video, professor of Human-Computer Interaction at University College London and expert in qualitative user studies Ann Blandford provides an overview of what an analysis process can look like.
Thematic analysis is used in many different research fields, but the steps are always the same, and here we build our detailed description of the steps on a famous article, by qualitative researchers in psychology Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, called Using thematic analysis in psychology. We describe the process as you might do it in a business setting so, if you are conducting interviews for academic purposes, you should look up the original article.
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How Audext Can Help You Create Interview Transcript Template
As youll be able to read and edit each of your transcripts with a built-in Audext feature it will be extremely easy to format it and create a perfect interview transcript example. After youre done with editing and formatting you can easily download your file in TXT or DOC format.
All of our transcription processes and editing tool is done with advanced AI technology, to ensure the best quality and provide you the most accurate transcription services available. And we back this all up with high-quality customer support, to deal with special requests, and tricky problems to make you enjoy the interviewing process and forget about transcription fuss.
With Audext you dont need to think about manual interview transcription anymore we got you covered!
Technology is constantly changing the way interviewers produce stories
- Fast interview transcription
How To Do A Thematic Analysis Of User Interviews
You have been in the field talking to users and you now find yourself with a massive amount of audio, notes, video, pictures, and interesting impressions. All that information can be overwhelming, and its difficult to know where to start to make sense of all the data. Here, we will teach you how to go from information chaos to patterns and themes that represent the most interesting aspects of your data and which you can use as the foundation for personas, user scenarios and design decisions.
No matter which type of study you are doing and for what purpose, the most important thing in your analysis is that you respect the data and try to represent your interview as honestly as possible. When you share your results with others, you should be transparent about everything in your research process, from how you recruited participants to how you performed the analysis. This will make it easier for people to trust in the validity of your results. People who dont agree with your conclusion might be critical of your research results, but if you know that you have done everything possible to represent your participants and your research process honestly, you should have no problem defending your results.
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S To Analyze An Interview Transcript For Qualitative Market Research
1. Reading the transcripts
You first need to familiarize yourself with the data. Reading the transcripts aims to get an initial impression and to explore the data. It helps to get an overview of the collected data by taking some notes or summarizing the ideas.
2. Coding the data
Coding or indexing is basically highlighting words, phrases, or sentences from the transcript. In a nutshell, a code is a description of the idea or feeling that is expressed in that part of the interview. You create a code when something interesting comes up or when a theme or pattern is repeated throughout the transcript. You can also create a code if an interviewer specifically states that a particular insight is important. Different colors correspond to different codes. You can produce as many codes as they can at this point.
3. Generating themes
At this point, it is time to narrow down the codes and create themes and categories. You can combine codes into a single theme. The main goal here is to discard irrelevant codes and focus on potential themes that are useful and make the analysis more credible.
4. Comparing the transcripts
5. Defining the themes
This is where you will come up with the final list of themes that you have generated from the interviews. To define a theme is to describe what is about, what makes it interesting, and how it contributes to the understanding of the data.
6. Writing the results
Create A Report Of Your Interview Analysis
When its time to publish, MAXQDA is here to help you present your data. Whether youre exporting the codebook to share your code definitions with your thesis supervisor, archiving your data for the European Unions new re-use regulations, or creating a report in your own corporate design, MAXQDA is here to help. You can find all the options in MAXQDAs Reports tab.
Lets take a look at an amazing tool called the Smart Publisher, MAXQDAs powerful report generator. It is extremely easy to use so that in just a few moments you will have a Word document neatly presenting the results of your coding including title page and table of contents.
Extract from a Smart Publisher report
Just go to the Reports tab and then click on the Smart Publisher icon. Now choose in the dialog menu, which codes should be included in the report. In the next dialog window, you design your report with the help of some settings. You choose the title and the image for the first page, header and/or footer, order of the coded segments and the source information that you want to include in your report. Then all that is left to do is to click ok and your report is done!
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Tip Of The Month: Helpful Features To Analyze Interviews With Maxqda Step
MAXQDA is the perfect software to help you transcribe, organize, analyze, visualize, and publish your interview data! This article will help introduce you to several helpful MAXQDA 2020 functions step-by-step, which will make your data gathering and analysis journey more efficient and fun than ever before.
Dont worry if your analysis process might be different than what is described here each project is different and MAXQDA has a comprehensive range of functions options so that you can customize your analysis to fit the needs of your research project. The functions we describe here are just examples to get you started, but if you want to see praxis examples, you can also find several real-world examples of research projects where interviews were analyzed, right here in the MAXQDA Research Blog.
Transcript Example With Word And Pdf Templates
This post may contain affiliate links. See my disclosure for more info.
This resource includes a transcript example from an interview, formatted in several different ways:
- Clean verbatim style
- Timestamps at regular intervals
- Timestamps at speaker or paragraph intervals
I made these .docx and PDF example transcripts for university students, educators, non-profits, journalists, filmmakers, and transcriptionists.
Quick tip: If youre not using it already, you can install free transcription software like Express Scribe to help you manually transcribe interviews much faster. The software lets you control audio playback using hotkeys so you dont have to keep starting and stopping audio with your mouse.
And if you want to go REALLY fast, I also recommend getting a transcription foot pedal . Together, these two tools will save you hours upon hours of transcription time.
If youre a professional transcriptionist looking for work, make sure to check out my other blog posts for tons of work-from-home job leads, or browse online transcription and proofreading jobs on FlexJobs here . FlexJobs is my top-recommended resource for higher-paying remote jobs from top-rated employers like Apple, Salesforce, and Capital One.
Okay, on to the transcript examples!
Interview transcription format sample for Microsoft Word
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What Is Qualitative Data Analysis
Qualitative data analysis is the process of examining and interpreting qualitative data to understand what it represents.
Qualitative data is defined as any non-numerical and unstructured data when looking at customer feedback, qualitative data usually refers to any verbatim or text-based feedback such as reviews, open-ended responses in surveys, complaints, chat messages, customer interviews, case notes or social media posts
For example, NPS metric can be strictly quantitative, but when you ask customers why they gave you a rating a score, you will need qualitative data analysis methods in place to understand the comments that customers leave alongside numerical responses.
Types of qualitative data analysis
Automatic coding software
A Complete Guide To Writing Interview Transcripts
Writing an interview transcript requires patience, listening skills and careful editing. Interview transcripts help to streamline the hiring process and provide accurate records of the events that occur in an interview. In this article, we guide you through the interview transcription process and provide you with a list of benefits writing an interview transcription can bring you and your organization.
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Transcribe All The Interviews And Focus Group Recordings
The next critical step is transcription. Done alone, this is a long and tedious process. There are dozens of pitfalls when performing transcriptions manually as well. Rev provides a variety of transcription services that take the tedium and guesswork out of the research process.
You can order transcriptions from Rev with both audio and video recordings. Once youve received your professional transcripts from Rev, you can begin your qualitative analysis.
Outsourcing To A Transcription Agency
If the recording is in a language you dont understand, or if you dont have time to do the transcription yourself, then outsourcing to a transcription agency is a good idea.
All you have to do is send them your recording with detailed instructions and they will return a neatly formatted and time-coded transcript to you in a fairly short period of time.
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Preparing Qualitative Data For Analysis
1. Create clean data Ensure transcripts from your interviews or focus groups are clear and readable:
- Clarify meaning where needed by adding additional words in brackets to increase readability of sentences. Where appropriate, make fragments into full sentences.
- Write out abbreviations and acronyms as full words.
- Move text to its appropriate place .
- Flag good quotes. Then remove names or identifying information, unless you receive permission to attribute the quotefrom the participant.
Intelligent Verbatim Transcript Example
Frank: True, its going to be the greatest in the history of the world.
Jon: Id expect no less. I think it will put an end to the conflict in the Middle East, I mean quite possibly.
Frank: Thats true.
Jon: No, no Im confusing that with a nuclear bomb. Im sorry, yours is not going to bomb. Yours is actually going to do really well. But lets share some ideas I want to run by you and then if I can get some information from you its going to help a whole lot.
This is snippet from a interview transcript between Jon and Frank. The purpose of the interview was to gather information on a product thats being launched. So the intelligent verbatim approach works really well in this particular case. It reads fairly easily and from the transcript you can quickly get the information you need. This type of transcription is perfect for researchers using the grounded approach or analyzing for themes and categories.
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Use A Codebook To Keep Track Of Your Codes
As you code more and more data, it can be hard to remember all of your codes off the top of your head. Tracking your codes in a codebook helps keep you organized throughout the data analysis process. Your codebook can be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet or word processor document. As you code new data, add new codes to your codebook and reorganize categories and themes as needed.
Make sure to track:
- The label used for each code
- A description of the concept or theme the code refers to
- Who originally coded it
- The date that it was originally coded or updated
- Any notes on how the code relates to other codes in your analysis
How To Transcribe An Interview For Dissertation Part 2
t is a truism to note that all transcription is in some sense interpretation
In the first post of this 2 part series on how to transcribe an interview for dissertation, I gave you on overview of the transcription process, equipment youll need, 3 ways to transcribe your interviews and made a few remarks on accuracy of the transcripts, and recording high quality interviews .
In this second and final post in this series on how to transcribe academic interviews for dissertation I get into the minutia of transcription. How do you transcribe? What are the different ways you can transcribe your thesis interviews ?
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How To Do Thematic Analysis
Published on September 6, 2019 by Jack Caulfield. Revised on September 7, 2021.
Thematic analysis is a method of analyzing qualitative data. It is usually applied to a set of texts, such as interview transcripts. The researcher closely examines the data to identify common themes topics, ideas and patterns of meaning that come up repeatedly.
There are various approaches to conducting thematic analysis, but the most common form follows a six-step process: familiarization, coding, generating themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, and writing up.
This process was originally developed for psychology research by Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke. However, thematic analysis is a flexible method that can be adapted to many different kinds of research.
