Settling Back down

Last weekend should have been my parents golden wedding celebration (my Mum got the whole do cancelled as she cracked her pelvis the morning before) so it is time I settled down to sorting out my thesis post exams.  There are bits that annoy me about the report such as me admitting that on one reference I could not find the original and thinking therefore there were lots. There are exactly two pieces I could not trace and the second is not actually referenced in my thesis. I have now found that reference and found that the reference to it was wrong. The other remains a mystery and if a historian wants an intriguing puzzle I am willing to set out what the problem is. There are other things I will struggle with such as doing a literature review without a topic. My thesis draws on a wide range of literature and doing a review over the thesis would be as long as the thesis.

Anyway today was the day to settle down and get something done. Actually some weeks back I made up a table of the interviews I did and I will send that to my supervisor. I have also found a paper by Voas and will trace others. However, today I sat down and began to go through the audio recordings. I am actually transcribing them. This was something I was thinking I was going to have to twist and only transcribe in parts. Then a couple of weeks back I went to a session by QSR and they talked of three levels of transcribing:

1.  The highly detailed favoured by conversational analyst, which often uses the Jefferson Transcription System. This is what I started out using.
2. The medium one tries to capture words but turns it into good enough English. I tried this and most of the interviews I had transcribed in this was done using a system suggested by Catherine Kohler Riessman book Narrative Analysis 
3. They third is the notes one and just tries to capture the gist of what was being said in the interview.

It is the third form that I am now using. I am leaving out most of what I said and just trying to capture the essence of what was said back to me, although that often means working in the interviewees own words. It will give me enough to code to for the analysis and I will be able to select bits that I want to include into the thesis and then transcribe them up to the second level. My analysis does not justify taking them up to the first level. The difference is remarkable I have transcribed two interviews this weekend and I would have got a third done but for software.

I am transcribing in QSR NVivo and need to because that gives me the ability to select the precise bits I need to code and the ability to link these to the tape recording to later produce the precise transcripts of the relevant pieces. However, the software has crashed most times I have tried to close an recording with a transcript I have been working on. I have checked the software is up to date. I have removed the first recording this happened with and brought it in again. I have waited up to an hour for the software to do its bit. It will fortunately save the transcript just as long as I do not close it! The result is yesterday I transcribed about half an hour of interview three or more times and I have had losses today as well. Now as I finish a section of the transcription I save the project. 

Anyway I hope to get this sorted this week and I have ordered a foot pedal so I do not need to use my hands to control the audio player on the computer. I have also found another book that needs to go into the thesis as it deals with an area close allied to my thesis although not overlapping. I think it was published after I reviewed congregational studies in the Reformed churches and found two studies. This makes a third.