- #Structured interview transcripts + word + nvivo 12 how to
- #Structured interview transcripts + word + nvivo 12 code
However, depending on the number of transcripts and how often errors in the paragraph styles occur this can be a lengthy process. It is possible to open each of the nodes and manually recode the sections. The lorem ipsum are sections of the interview where the interviewer or participant were speaking with ‘Heading 1’ wrongly applied. For the interviewer we use ‘IV1’ so that the label is distinct from the rest of the transcript, and as will be shown later making creating a macro easier.
#Structured interview transcripts + word + nvivo 12 code
As part of the anonymisation process we give each participant a code number in this example ‘WSU-DU-PF-012’. The picture below shows a mock-up example of the results from auto-coding based on paragraph styles on some of our transcripts. Whilst there is only a small percentage of transcripts with errors in the paragraph styles they remained frequent enough to cause headaches when trying to auto-code them. All transcripts were specified to use ‘Heading 1’ for the participant and interviewer labels, with the rest in plain text. With each interview and focus group lasting roughly an hour we have thousands of pages of text. On the Welfare Conditionality project that I am currently part of, we currently have over 1000 interview and focus group transcripts. As can be seen in the screenshot above although the text following the first IV1 looks like plain text both the paragraph “Lorem ipsum…” and the empty line are included in the Headings structure. The first tab “Headings” shows the structure of the headings used in the document. Pressing Ctrl and F on the keyboard at the same time in Word brings up the Navigation panel. Within NVivo this results in a node with the name ‘-’ being created, with any text following an empty line with a heading being coded to it. Similarly, empty lines can still have paragraph styles applied to them, meaning that any which accidentally have a heading style applied can lead to the text following it being coded to the wrong node. Sections that look like plain text can in fact have had a heading style applied to it, then been reformatted to look like plain text but without changing the paragraph style. However, within Word it is not always clear what paragraph style is applied to each section of text. The majority of transcribers are happy to produce transcripts based on a specified style.
Normal, Title, Quote, Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.) can then be used by NVivo as signals for which node to code the text that follows them. For example, applying “Heading 1” to “Interviewer” and “Participant” labels before what was said. When auto-coding one of the easiest ways to structure transcripts is to use headings in the text to signal who is speaking.
This post briefly covers what type of errors can arise and provides a set by step guide to creating a Visual Basic macro within Microsoft Word that can automate the process of fixing the paragraph styles in transcripts so they can be auto-coded without error.Īuto-coding requires transcripts to be structured in particular ways and that this structure remains consistent throughout the whole of the document.
Depending on the extent and nature of the errors this can be a headache to manually fix. However, any mistakes in the structure of the interview transcripts can result in them being incorrectly auto-coded.
Even in one-to-one interviews this can be worth doing so that any word frequency queries, word clouds, etc can be limited to only include sections from the transcripts where a participant is speaking. This can be useful to separate out the different speakers within a transcript whereby everything they say is coded to a node with their participant code number.
#Structured interview transcripts + word + nvivo 12 how to
Basically, what auto-coding does is go through the transcript and using criteria specified by the user assigns text to chosen nodes (further explanation of auto-coding and how to do it in NVivo is available on the NVivo help website). Within NVivo, and likely other QDAS packages as well, it is possible to use the structure of interview transcripts for auto-coding.