Focus Group Transcription Services: Why Professionals Need Them

Market research is vitally important to your day-to-day business. It allows you to collect valuable information so you can make more informed decisions. But the way you collect that research – and how you can access it – can make a huge difference in the perceived quality of the research. Focus group transcription services help improve the quality of your data in a couple of key ways.

Let’s explore how.

Convert Audio and Video to Text for Better Documentation – and More Accurate Research

Information is usually collected in two ways:

• Recorded audio or video
• A note-taker writing down notes

Both seem straightforward, but both collection methods have drawbacks which we’ll describe in the next two sections. Then, we’ll explain how focus group transcription services can help compensate for these drawbacks.

Information in Recorded Sessions is Hard to Access

This sounds counterintuitive. But the reality is, many people actually do not play back focus group sessions – at least in their entirety. If they do play back any of it, they usually go to specific places in the audio or video to clarify a point. So while accessing the audio and video is as easy as hitting the play button, accessing the information contained within them is time-consuming. It often takes jumping around the recording to find the exact spot where something is said. Perhaps you’ve experienced this frustration yourself!

Note-taking is Subjective

You may say, well, that’s what the note-taker is for, to summarize information in the recordings. And absolutely, they can jot down observations and underline key points in the focus group conversation. In theory, this is a great way to get the highlights of the conversations. However, note-taking is subjective and, therefore, can be affected by a form of survey bias. In other words, you may be getting information back about the moderator’s impressions of the conversation rather than hard data on what’s actually being said.

How Focus Group Transcription Services Solve Both Problems

Focus group transcription services reduce note-taker bias by:

• Allowing all the principles in the research to draw their own conclusions based on the transcription
• Generating written reports directly from the transcripts rather than from notes and recollections after the fact
• Delving deeper for more objective answers. For example, with a written transcript, you can calculate how many times a specific word was used in each session, such as “delicious” or “uncomfortable,” making the data much more quantitative (e.g., “the word ‘delicious’ appeared in the conversation 37 times” vs. “the group said the product was delicious”)

This third point overlaps with the next way focus group transcription services helps: they improve ease of use. Converting the audio and video sources to text will give you a verbatim copy of the session. This written transcript allows you to:

• Skim quickly to get a sense of the focus group session and its results
• Jump around easily to different points in the transcript to read particular exchanges
• Search the transcript by keyword so that you can instantly go to any point in the conversation

Anything worth recording is worth keeping. Focus group transcription services help you preserve – and use – the market research information you glean from those sessions more effectively for better results.

Contact Preferred Transcriptions today to find out how our professional focus group transcription services can help you improve the quality and usability of your market research. Call 610-539-9208 or email us using our contact form.