Most interviews will include names and personal details about the interviewee but also people around them in their lives. It allows you to pause, play and rewind with your foot so that you can continue typing normally, which saves a lot of time if you have a lot of transcribing to do. Buy a foot pedal! It sounds silly but this was great advice from my supervisors.It takes a REALLY long time (about six hours to type up a one hour interview, more if you have group interviews) so don’t leave it all to the end! Transcribe interviews throughout the research where possible.(You can use Audacity to convert WAV to MP3). I recorded my interviews as WAV files but decided to import them to NVivo as MP3 files, which take up less space. It is important to check the recording was successful and to back it up ASAP. Upload, format and backup your audio files as soon as possible after the interview.Thus, by the time I had finished the fieldwork and transcribed all the interviews, I was familiar with their content, had developed summaries of each interview and had developed a set of ideas to focus my analysis. While this, in my opinion, added ‘texture’ to the transcripts and offers a more holistic representation(1) of the interview to any reader, it also proved time-consuming for me, and distracting and/or challenging for participants who tended, when asked to reflect on the transcripts, to comment on their speaking skills rather than the content of what they said.Īlthough transcription was time-consuming, especially given the verbatim and holistic style of transcription chosen, doing it myself facilitated an earlier layer of analysis to take place between interviews. As O’Reilly points out, transcribing yourself “enables you to start identifying themes and making connections” and helps you to become familiar with the data (2004: 153). I chose to transcribe my interviews verbatim and attempted, as far as possible, to include voice changes, hesitations, pauses and jokes and sarcasm within the transcript, as well as retaining the qualities of spoken language as far as possible.