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<h2 class="hd hd-2 unit-title">Read: Transcription & Data Organization</h2>
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<h3 style="background-color: #28a6de; font-size: 20px; color: #256a97; height: 35px; text-indent: 10px; padding-top: 10px; border-radius: 3px;"><strong><span style="color: #ffffff;">Read: Transcription and Data Organization</span></strong></h3>
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<p>A crucial step in beginning your data analysis is transcribing the interviews you have conducted into a text document that can be coded. </p>
<p>It is best to have an audio recording of your interviews, recordings that capture the entirety of each interview. It’s important to work from a recorded interview because that captures the exact words of the respondent, rather than working from your notes. If you do not record the interview, you will be missing portions of the respondent’s words, purposively or inadvertently. You will have already imposed your own filter on the respondent’s experience, exactly what qualitative research seeks to avoid.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 1em;">You will need a verbatim textual transcript to work from, to do your coding and analysis. Transcribing interviews can be tedious and time-consuming. I estimate 4 hours of typing for each hour of a recorded interview. Most researchers do not want to put in the time to do this and thus find ways to hire assistants, a professional service, or use digital technology for transcription. The transcription software available online needs to be checked very carefully for accuracy. You will have to read through the text to make sure it accurately states what was said. Although transcription can be tedious, I recommend that my students do this with at least one interview so that they recapture the interview experience and while typing generate insights, questions, critiques that are less likely to arise from reading alone. </span>My students tell me that transcribing (and/or correcting a digitally transcribed recording) helps them become immersed in the data, generate ideas, and advance their analysis and interpretations. I agree completely. Doing this transcription work is more intellectually demanding and thus analytically productive than simply reading a transcript. </p>
<p><span style="font-size: 1em;">The text should be a verbatim transcription of the interview, as well as any other pertinent information of note about the interview such as laughter, interruptions, or long pauses. T</span>yped notes should be included within or at the end of a clearly structured and labelled transcript that you can work with. </p>
<p><span style="font-size: 1em;">From the beginning, you should implement a file organization and naming structure, and stick to this throughout the project. This is particularly important if you are collaborating with other people, to ensure that the organization is clear, consistent, and obvious to all users. Even if you are working alone, in research there is a saying “You are your best collaborator.” You should always organize your files in such a way that if you stopped working on the project for a while and came back to it, you would understand exactly where you were when you left off. Finally, you should implement such a system so that when the data is ultimately archived, which is a common expectation today, the next researcher will be able to know how the data set was constructed.</span></p>
<p>You could also consider making a catalog or index of all of your data and files, which could note information about where the file is located, when it was created, what it is called, and so on. You should also keep in mind that this is sensitive data, that will need to follow <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/" target="_blank">human subjects guidelines.</a> If your study promised anonymity to the research subjects, you should make sure to remove all identifying information from the data you are working with and assign an anonymous identification system in place of names. You can maintain a key with the names matched with the anonymous identifier, which would be kept in a password-protected folder. And of course, you should be periodically making backups of all of your files on an external hard drive or source. </p>
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<h2 class="hd hd-2 unit-title">Watch: Organizing Data into Units of Analysis</h2>
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<h3 style="background-color: #28a6de; font-size: 20px; color: #256a97; height: 35px; text-indent: 10px; padding-top: 10px; border-radius: 3px;"><strong><span style="color: #ffffff;">Watch: Organizing Data into Units of Analysis</span></strong></h3>
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<h2 class="hd hd-2 unit-title">Example: Units of Analysis & Summary Memos</h2>
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<h3 style="background-color: #28a6de; font-size: 20px; color: #256a97; height: 35px; text-indent: 10px; padding-top: 10px; border-radius: 3px;"><strong><span style="color: #ffffff;">Example: Units of Analysis</span></strong></h3>
<p>In the last lecture video, Professor Silbey discussed organizing your data into units of analysis, in order to group documents that relate to one another. Below is an example of a unit of analysis from the Common Place of Law project. The composition of your unit might be different, depending on your topic and focus, though you can think of this as an inspiration for what each unit could contain. </p>
<p>Units of analysis are not necessarily the units of data collection. For a more thorough understanding of units of analysis, look in a basic research text, for example, <a href="https://www.cengage.com/c/the-practice-of-social-research-15e-babbie/9780357360767/" target="_blank">Babbie, The Practice of Social Research</a>, for a fuller description of units of analysis. In essence, however, the unit of analysis is the phenomena or object about which we wish to make a knowledge claim. Much social science describes and explains behavior at the level of individuals, for example, why are some people wealthy but others poor. But we can also focus on families, groups, organizations and arrange our data accordingly, just as Professor Bittner organized his observations of the police by events or interactions: citizen-police interactions. As mentioned in the video, we organized our data by the person interviewed (individuals) but then reorganized it by events or problems interviews talked about, each event/problem as a unit. By shifting the unit of analysis, we produce opportunities to see different dimensions of the social setting or problem. <a href="https://courses.mitxonline.mit.edu/asset-v1:MITxT+21A.819.2x+3T2021+type@asset+block@james_jaccard_phd_jacob_jacoby_phd_theory_construction_and_model-building_skills_a_practical_guide_for_social_scientists_methodology_in_the_social_sciences__2009.pdf" target="_blank">James Jaccard and Jacob Jacoby (2010, 59-62) (Theory Construction and Model-Building Skills)</a> provide a short but rich account of how shifting units and levels of analysis help advance data analysis.</p>
<p><strong style="font-size: 1em;">UNIT OF ANALYSIS: CODE #</strong></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Interview Transcript</strong>: This is the full transcript of the interview you conducted, along with any information that is relevant such as interviewer and transcriber name, dates, etc. </p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Interviewee Fieldnotes</strong>: When you conduct an interview, you should be taking a lot of notes about the location, the appearance of your subject, their behavior in the interview, and anything else that might be relevant later. This information won't be captured in the transcript, but it could be incredibly useful for you later in the project. [<strong><a href="https://courses.mitxonline.mit.edu/asset-v1:MITxT+21A.819.2x+3T2021+type@asset+block@Interviewers_notes__33_-1.pdf" target="_blank">Interviewer Fieldnotes</a></strong>] is an example of notes that an interviewer jotted down after completing the interview. </p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Summary Memo</strong>: Summary memos can be organized by asking a consistent set of questions after coding each interview or day of field notes. For example, who is this person? What is this person’s experience of (whatever is your topic)? How do the person’s interpretations vary? The summary memo is the first significant effort to start to synthesize across your data and develop categories for collecting pieces of data within possible larger more general or abstract concepts. It is an effort to move from the discrete statements in the texts to theoretically meaningful concepts. <span style="font-size: 1em;">Here we have a few examples to look at. [</span><strong style="font-size: 1em;"><a href="https://courses.mitxonline.mit.edu/asset-v1:MITxT+21A.819.2x+3T2021+type@asset+block@Summary_Memo_2.1.pdf" target="_blank">First Working Draft</a></strong><span style="font-size: 1em;">] is an example of what your first draft of the summary memo might look like. You can start to summarize the unit of analysis here, and get some of your initial ideas down. Notice that this working draft is somewhat rough, and contains some initial notes, and has a focus on narrative storytelling, which disappears from later drafts of the summary memos, as the researchers shift their focus. [</span><strong style="font-size: 1em;"><a href="https://courses.mitxonline.mit.edu/asset-v1:MITxT+21A.819.2x+3T2021+type@asset+block@summary_memo_-_2nd_working_draft.pdf" target="_blank">Second Working Draft</a></strong><span style="font-size: 1em;">] is an example of a summary memo towards the end of the project. Note that it is much more polished and contains a lot of descriptions of the unit of analysis and quotes. [</span><strong style="font-size: 1em;"><a href="https://courses.mitxonline.mit.edu/asset-v1:MITxT+21A.819.2x+3T2021+type@asset+block@summary_memo_1.pdf" target="_blank">Final Working Draft</a></strong><span style="font-size: 1em;">] is how the information from the summary memo appeared in the published work of the project. This gives you an example of how you can use this text when you are shaping your final work. </span></p>
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<h2 class="hd hd-2 unit-title">Resources</h2>
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<h3 style="background-color: #28a6de; font-size: 20px; color: #256a97; height: 35px; text-indent: 10px; padding-top: 10px; border-radius: 3px;"><strong><span style="color: #ffffff;">Resources</span></strong></h3>
<p>Some of the most popular qualitative analysis software are NVivo, Atlas.ti, MAXQDA, or dedoose, although there are many others that you could use. Most software companies have extensive training options for learning to use the program (and if not, there is likely a youtube video that will be able to help!), so we will not cover that in this course. We can recommend some places to start looking for training, however. Most software programs offer discounts for students or educators, so it's worth looking around to make sure the tool will fit your needs and your budget. </p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a href="https://www.qsrinternational.com/nvivo-qualitative-data-analysis-software/home" target="_blank">NVivo</a> - <a href="https://campusguides.lib.utah.edu/c.php?g=160562&p=1051174" target="[object Object]">Training Videos</a>, allows for a free trial, variable licensing </p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a href="https://atlasti.com/" target="[object Object]">Atlas.ti</a> - <a href="https://atlasti.com/learning/?_ga=2.74358161.2052137443.1611252084-100130376.1611252084" target="_blank">Training videos</a>, allows for a free trial, variable licensing </p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a href="https://www.maxqda.com/" target="_blank">MAXQDA</a> - <a href="https://www.maxqda.com/maxqda-2020-video-tutorials" target="_blank">Training videos</a></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a href="https://www.dedoose.com/" target="_blank">Dedoose</a> - <a href="https://www.dedoose.com/resources/videos" target="_blank">Training videos</a></p>
<p>Transcription Options: There are a number of transcription services on the internet that one can use to transcribe your interviews, as well as creative ways to take advantage of free transcription services. (For instance, Zoom creates a text transcript of each meeting, so if you are conducting interviews in Zoom, you already have a text to work from). Keep in mind, no matter what the service claim is, you can't trust that they will transcribe the interview perfectly, so you should always go back and check to make sure the text is correct. </p>
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