Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Interviewing: Unstructured and Semistructured 231
capturing the main elements of speech), how clear the tape is, and how proficient
you are in the language and in typing. Invest in a transcription machine.
Don’t even try to transcribe taped interviews without one of those machines
unless you are conducting an experiment to see how long it takes to get frustrated
with transcribing. These machines cost around $250 to $300. You use a
foot pedal to start and stop the machine, to back up and to fast forward, and
even to slow down the tape so you can listen carefully to a phrase or a word.
A transcription machine and a good set of earphones will save you many hours
of work because you can keep both hands on your keyboard all the time.
It isn’t always necessary to fully transcribe interviews. If you are using life
histories to describe how families in some community deal with prolonged
absence of fathers, then you must have full transcriptions to work with. And
you can’t study cultural themes, either, without full transcriptions. But if you
want to know how many informants said they had actually used oral rehydration
therapy to treat their children’s diarrhea, you may be able to get away
with only partial transcription. You may even be as well off using an interview
guide and taking notes. (More about transcribing machines in appendix F.)
Whether you do full transcriptions or just take notes during interviews,
always try to record your interviews. You may need to go back and fill in
details in your notes.
Voice Recognition Software
Voice recognition software (VRS) has come of age. You listen to an interview
through a set of headphones and repeat the words—both your questions
and your informant’s responses—out loud, in your own voice. The software
listens to your voice and types out the words across the screen. You go over
each sentence to correct mistakes (tell it that the word ‘‘bloat’’ should be
‘‘float’’ for instance) and to format the text (tell it where to put punctuation
and paragraph breaks). The process is slow at first, but the software learns
over time to recognize inflections in your voice, and it makes fewer and fewer
mistakes as weeks go by. It also learns all the special vocabulary you throw
at it. The built-in vocabularies of current VRS systems are enormous—
something like 300,000 words—but, though they may be ready to recognize
polygamy, for example, you’ll have to teach it polygyny or fraternal polyandry.
And, of course, you’ll have to train it to recognize words from the language
of your field site. If you say, ‘‘Juanita sold eight huipiles at the market
this week,’’ you’ll have to spell out ‘‘Juanita’’ and ‘‘huipiles’’ so the software
can add these words to its vocabulary.
As the software gets trained, the process moves up to 95%–98% accuracy
at about 100 to 120 word per minute. With a 2%–5% error rate, you still have