Academic Research Enhanced: The Role of Transcription Accuracy
Overview: Academic research data transcription helps improve the research and documentation process. Not only is it easier since text is more searchable, it helps you quantitatively analyze qualitative data. Having a transcription also makes writing papers and documenting the research process easier.
However, accuracy is important, as is the case with all research data. That’s why finding a reliable – and, as we’ll see, human – transcription solution is vital to your academic research project.
Four Reasons Why Academic Research Data Transcription is Important
1. Searchability
It’s difficult to rank every advantage in order of importance – all four items in this list are important! – but searchability ranks near the top. Once you collect the data, you need to easily review and collate them. That’s hard to do if all you have are audio and video files. Plus, it’s very difficult to find the exact quote or idea from an interview session by skipping through recorded interviews. Transcription makes your data more searchable, so you can spend seconds locating a specific data point rather than minutes or hours.
2. Analysis
Quantifying subjective data can be difficult, as we all know. But there are ways to do it. For example, coding allows you to do things such as count recurring words or phrases such as “easy to use” or “great design” or even simply “loved”. Converting your audio and video sources to text using academic research data transcription makes this type of analysis possible.
3. Writing
Ultimately, you will share your findings in a report or academic research paper. You’ll base your paper on your analysis, of course. Chances are, you’ll be quoting interview subjects to support your results. Converting your research data to written transcripts makes report writing – and quoting – much easier. Transcription helps you preserve the research data for both subjective and objective findings.
4. Documentation
Many research projects require review through an ethics board. For academic research projects, this can be when you’re interviewing subjects, i.e., collecting research data in audio and/or video form. Academic research data transcription makes documenting your project so much easier. This way, you can provide ethics review boards with a written record. Of course, this is just one example. There are many others who you may need to report to including administration, donors, and other stakeholders. Transcription makes it all easier.
The Role of Transcription Accuracy for Academic Researchers
There are many benefits that come with academic research transcription, but accuracy counts for everything. Transcription is, at its core, an interpretive act. The transcriptionist listens to the oral words and converts them into written words on the screen. This sounds simple, but it can be deceptively complex. So much depends on the speaker’s and listener’s accents, proficiency in the language, cultural background (especially in cases such as idioms), and general language abilities. Notably, the English proficiency of the listener is much more important than the speaker’s when interpreting language.
Obviously, interpretation can negatively affect your transcription accuracy – and, in turn, the accuracy of your academic research data. Not only can that impact the research study itself, but inaccurate data can have ethical and legal implications. Offshoring transcription is a big problem for many reasons, not least of all for the language barrier, problems with accents, and privacy/data theft concerns. AI transcription can contain many errors with a low 86-90% accuracy rate, depending on who you believe.
That’s why you need:
- Human transcriptionists
- U.S.-based transcriptionists
- A reliable, established transcription company
Preferred Transcriptions – Your Preferred Solution!
Contact Preferred Transcriptions today and find out how easy it is to get the quality academic research data transcription you need. You’ll work with live, U.S.-based transcriptionists every time, so you know you’re getting accurate and reliable transcription services every time.
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