Categories: phd
Tags: thesis, transcription, interviews, PhD
Date: 02 July 2008 22:00:02
Transcribing interviews will always take a million times longer than you expect it to. Even though everybody tells you it will take forever, and you factor in loads more time than you think you will need, this will never be enough.
I am (at last) seeing the light at the end of the tunnel with this one. I can't remember if I've blogged about it before, but basically although I got all my interviews transcribed by native speakers, their previous experience of transcribing (with a v.important multinational donor) was different to my requirements. I wanted them word for word, warts and mistakes and all, and didn't want grammar/etc correcting or the rambly bits where the respondent ummed and ahhed cut out. However they were so used to tidying up and prettifying interviews that despite my painstaking instructions, I have had to go through every single interview again and add the bits that were missed out, reinsert all the grammar mistakes (that is particularly soul-destroying, as they had rendered my questions grammatically perfect when I knew perfectly well that I had fumbled my way through them!) and, in parts, completely rewrite some of them. This process has taken the best part of an academic year (for 43 interviews), because as well as transcribing being slow work, when it's not in your native language it's even more difficult and painstaking.
I have been doing other things as well. I often find that if I have a couple of days' transcribing which goes well, the next day I wake up and my brains are like mushy peas, and I'm simply too too tired to do any more. Having breaks every so often does mean that I get back to it fresher and probably go through it quicker than I would if I slogged every single day. It has also been a useful process (albeit begrudging!) in that I have got right back into my data and have had all sorts of thought-processy things going on that have shaped how I will probably write up my thesis. But I am SO fed up of it now!
But - there's only 3 to go now. I'm so excited that I can finally get on with actually writing my thesis, rather than listening to my hideous mangling of the language!