3 Transcription Tips For Doctoral Students

Doctoral students need to write a thesis-dissertation as a part of the final requirement of the PhD program. A major portion of the dissertation content is derived from the research interviews that a student conducts with various experts of the industry. After all the dissertation interviews have been recorded they are required to be converted to a transcript and then attached in the dissertation papers. Here are some dissertation transcription tips for Doctoral Students.

3 Tips for Doctoral Students Who Are About To Record Dissertation Interviews.

Tip#1: Buy an decently quality voice recorder. The best voice recorder companies are Sony, Olympus, RCA and Philips. You should spend too much on a voice recorder. Anything above $100 is a expensive in our opinion. Voice recorders in the range of $50 to $75 will make an excellent voice recorder. You can record several interviews with it at one go. If possible select a recorder which has replaceable batteries. There are some recorders in the market which are powered by a non-replaceable lithium ion batteries. As lithium ion batteries have a good battery life only up to the number of life cycles it has. Beyond that you could need to get the batteries replaced or buy a new device again. It's better to invest in a decent voice recorder as they may come in handy in the future also.

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Things To Look For In An Excellent Voice Recorder

1. Expandable memory. Buy the one which has an SD card inbuilt to it.
2. Should have more than 1 mic.
3. Exposed mics can be avoided as you might be paying unnecessary premium for it. Plus they are not necessary.
4. Should have a USB port.
5. Battery life should be enough that you can record 3-4 hours of interviews at one go.

Tips#2: Record all the interviews in a noise free environment (Very imp). We highly recommend to researchers to always conduct recording sessions in a noise free environment. Some of these could be your universities conference room, inside a classroom when not in session, meeting rooms etc. We dissuade people for doing recordings in a restaurant as they can be too noise and result in noisy environment. All the noise is picked up by the voice recorder which can make it harder for the transcriptionist to transcribe the recording. If a restaurant is your best option and you don’t have an access to a conference room then choose on which would be the least noise.

Transcription companies charge extra for transcribing recordings with background noise.

Background noise will increase the number of inaudible (timestamped) in a transcript.

At times we have to cancel complete orders due to the excessive disturbance in the recording.

Tip#3: Hire an affordable transcriptionist for transcribing the interviews. Transcribing all the interviews can cost thousands of dollars. So let's say if you have recorded ten hours of research interviews. Ten hours of interviews total to 600 minutes. Companies charge students as per their transcription rates per minute of audio. This could start at $1.00 per minute and go up all the way to $3.00 per minute and more. So if you have to transcribe 600 minutes of audio then the total cost of transcription would come out to be $600 dollars. The prices vary from the transcription services you chose to hire.

From a transcribers perspective, these are the 3 key points to be kept in mind before beginning to conduct research interviews.

About the Author:

AllTranscript.com is online website which provides general transcription services such as conference transcription services and interview transcription services. AllTranscript.com is open for business 24x7, 365 days a year. Doctoral students and researchers can place all transcription orders directly on our website www.AllTranscript.com and receive the transcripts back within 3 days of place the order.For more tips and guides visit our blog http://guides.alltranscript.com. Thanks for reading.