Category Archives: Methodology

Audio Recording Methodologies

Tools and methods for recording interviews with enough audio fidelity, integrity and selectivity to support social research may seem relatively mundane or matter-of-fact. And for some research purposes, almost any digital or tape-based audio recorder will suffice. But choices among different methods and technologies can also shape important theoretical priorities and concerns. That’s also true for choices about how a recorded interview will be processed, converted, examined, analyzed or reproduced.

Traditionally, the first step in the post-interview workflow was to make a written transcript of the audio recording, a verbatim text that could then be edited or analyzed. That’s still a very common practice, but recent software and hardware developments make possible some intriguing alternatives. Choices between these alternative “methods” involve matters of personal preference and technical skill, but they also reflect and support different kinds of theorizing about the substance of culture and social life in general and the “content” of interviews in particular.

 Alternative Audio Analysis Strategies

Some of these choices are displayed in the figure above as four different strategies for working with an audio recording of an interview. Each strategy appears as a vertical column (labeled at the bottom as A, B, C and D) that starts with the same audio recording “stream.” In column ‘A,’ the strategy involves listening to the recording and making more or less detailed notes with a standard word processing program. The product of this method could be a log of the interview (in which a few details or themes are indexed to sequence or duration), a narrative or thematic summary of the interview, or a verbatim transcript (that might also include some features of a log or summary). When the process is complete, the researcher has in hand a text that can stand in for the audio recording in any subsequent rounds of analysis or reporting.

The second and third columns (‘B’ and ‘C’) suggest two different ways of building computer data base functions into the analysis of the same audio recording. In the Column ‘B,’ a written transcript is prepared, much as it might be in column ‘A’, but the transcript is then broken into chunks that are imported as individual records in a data base program. Each chunk of text, or record, can be coded and annotated, retrieved, and re-assembled according to different themes. This “code and retrieve” approach enables a researcher to bring together related comments from the same or different interviews for further analysis. It entails the same kind of conversion from audio to text that takes place in strategy ‘A’, but the “text” product itself is enriched to include not only a sequential summary or transcript, but a database of text “chunks” drawn from it.

In strategy ‘C’ the same data base features appear that were part of strategy ‘B,’ but with an interesting twist. Rather than first converting the audio recording into a text, and then breaking up the text into meaningful chunks, the audio recording itself is broken into chunks, with each chunk then identified with particular themes, questions or issues. Once again each chunk appears as an individual data base record, but the records themselves include a section of the audio recording. In contrast to ‘B,’ strategy ‘C’ allows analysis of the interview to be based on the audio recording itself (not a text translation of the interview) and leaves open the option of selective transcription after analysis is concluded. That said, both ‘B’ and ‘C’ split the continuous coherent “stream” of the audio recording (or its text transcription) into discrete chunks, which may or may not make sense for a particular line of inquiry.

In the far right column I have suggested a fourth approach that combines features of the preceding three. Strategy ‘D’ starts with the same audio recording as ‘A,’ ‘B’ and ‘C,’ but preserves that recording intact through subsequent rounds of analysis or transcription. In contrast to the other three approaches, text transcriptions, codes and annotations are attached directly to the audio recording as another “layer” of a digital file. This transforms the audio stream into an audio-text database; text is segmented and indexed to different sections of the audio recording without fragmenting the recording. Working with strategy ‘D,’ a researcher could listen to the entire recording, locate audio segments by searching for code words or summaries assigned to them– within or across interviews. This strategy thus preserves all the information of the source audio recording throughout the process of analysis.

These four different approaches present somewhat different technical challenges, but they also support different kinds of interview-based studies and different kinds of theorizing about culture and social life. To understand the implications of these contrasts it’s useful to consider four related distinctions: data “chunks” and “streams;” analytical “annotation” and “coding;” “audio” and “text” representations;” and the boundaries between “informants,” “colleagues,” and “audiences.”

Fieldwork and Everyday Life

We all practice casual forms of fieldwork just to stay alive and to navigate different situations (settings) that characterize the world in which we live. We do this by looking more or less closely (observations) at where we’re going, have been or hope to go; by asking people questions (interviews) about what goes on in places we’re trying to get a fix on, by collecting odds and ends (artifacts) that we can study to figure out what to do next–moving around, getting something done, or avoiding trouble. Along the way, we also develop and use our wits, skills and handy tools to represent what we’ve observed, heard, and collected in conversation with ourselves or others (depictions).

These same  features–settings, observations, interviews, artifacts and depictions–also form the basis of the more ambitious, systematic and formal forms of fieldwork practiced by sociologists and anthropologists. But important differences do exist between the kind of fieldwork that everyone does to navigate daily life and the fieldwork social researchers practice to understand people, culture and social life.

One way of thinking about these differences, is that social researchers conduct fieldwork by getting engaged with a distinctive constellation of ideas and things. The ideas include professional perspectives that researchers bring to their fieldwork, theories about what’s going on within and across different kinds of settings, and concepts or arguments that others scholars have made about similar or related phenomena. The things include specialized fieldwork materials and data sources, techniques for organizing those materials, and an assortment of recording, analysis and presentation tools.

Taken together, the confluence of these ideas and things constitutes the material culture of professional fieldwork. As examined in the post and pages of this website, that kind of fieldwork is a distinctive domain within the material culture of social research–which is itself a specialized strand of empirical inquiry. Throughout it all, the idea is to use empirical evidence to test ideas and use ideas to organize and analyze empirical evidence. The kind of fieldwork practiced by social researchers has no monopoly on that process, but it does have an interesting history.

Among people who have a professional interest in understanding culture and social life, fieldwork stands in pretty good stead. Some exemplary practitioners have also found fieldwork a compelling complement to everyday life and celebrate its potential to fuel personal or social transformation. Others have found it somewhat stimulating and kind of fun. Perhaps you will as well.