Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

228 Chapter 9
it?’’ Charles Kadushin (personal communication) hands people a microphone
with a shut-off switch. Rarely, he says, do respondents actually use the switch,
but giving people control over the interview shows that you take them very
seriously.
Sometimes you’ll be recording an interview and things will be going along
just fine and you’ll sense that a respondent is backing off from some sensitive
topic. Just reach over to the recorder and ask the respondent if she or he would
like you to turn it off. Harry Wolcott (1995:114) recommends leaving the
recorder on, if possible, when the formal part of an interview ends. Even
though you’ve finished, Wolcott points out, your respondent may have more
to say.
Recording Equipment: Machines, Media, and Batteries
The array of recording devices available today is impressive but, as you
make your choices of equipment to take to the field, remember: These are
tools and only tools. Don’t get caught up by the ‘‘gee whiz’’ factor. If it does
what you want it to do, no technology is obsolete.
There are three choices: cassette tape, minidisk (also known as MiniDisc,
or MD format), and digital. They all have their pluses and minuses, though I
suspect that this is the last edition of this book in which I’ll be talking about
tape.
Digital has a lot going for it. Good digital recorders start at around $75
(street price) and hold 10–15 hours of voice recording with 32mb of flash
memory. When the memory is full, you upload the contents to a computer
(through a USB port, for example) and then burn a CD to store your interviews
offline. If you have an Apple iPod, and if you don’t need all the disk
space for music, you can turn the machine into a digital audio recorder with a
plug-in microphone (see appendix F). A gigabyte of disk space holds about
400 hours of voice recordings, so a 20-gigabyte iPod has plenty of room for
both music and interviews.
But caution: (1) Use the right technology, or it will take as long to upload
digital audio to your computer, so you can transcribe it, as it takes to record it
in the first place. (2) Okay, you have the money to hire a transcriptionist. Be
sure that he or she can work from digital files. Transcribing from voice to text
is traditionally done with a transcribing machine (more on them in a minute),
and those machines are mostly for cassettes and microcassettes. You can make
a cassette from digital audio, but it’s very time consuming. (3) If you are in
an isolated field site and don’t have reliable power, digital audio can be risky.
Imagine filling your digital recorder and needing to upload before you can
start another interview and then . . . the power goes out, or your portable gen-