I’ll admit, I’m a relatively new convert to the value of transcripts. When I first started working in qualitative research 15 years ago, I had a different view: They were the backstop against lazy listening or sloppy note-taking. Like the safety net in a circus, transcripts were something that was there because it was needed but never touched by a top performer. So, what changed my mind? The answer is a shift in how we report findings and the availability of new technologies.
Nowadays, we write qualitative reports that are shorter and more attuned to business recommendations. This contrasts the older style wherein we basically played-back the discussion guide flow and reported, in sometimes painstaking detail, the “results” of each question we asked. It wasn’t uncommon to see yesterday’s qualitative reports look like quantitative reports: A deck full of mention tabulations and coded text – prefaced by 3 or 4 summary slides (the part we actually expected clients to read).
But the rub with today’s reporting, even though it’s by far better for our clients who need their “now what?” questions answered, is that we lost all that deep analysis of the entire qualitative dataset. Consequently, when clients need to dig through past reports to see if “old” data address their “new and now” questions, they more often find the reports either don’t contain the information or cover it too superficially for the present needs.
Transcripts help supplement this leaner reporting style. In fact, if you think about it, transcripts can now be seen as the backstop to responsive reporting instead of the backstop to lazy moderating or backroom notetaking duties. Because a transcript is a verbatim record of the entire conversation, even the tangential or low priority discussion topics are still captured for future use. And we all know from experience that a “low priority” topic from a few months ago can be the “hot topic” that executives need to make decisions about today.
Okay, so transcripts make sense… but what’s your next concrete step when you need to use them? Any brave soul who has ever hit “print” on 30 transcripts immediately regretted it – hopefully before they had to load another 500 sheets into the printer! And having 30 documents open in your word processor – trying to execute the same find/highlight/copy/paste steps across them – has probably generated as much frustration as managing the small tower of printouts. It was the classic “needle in a haystack” endeavor and was avoided unless absolutely necessary until…
Technology. We finally have purpose-built applications to manage transcript data from commercial qualitative research. Don’t get me wrong – we’ve always had some digital tools. But even after becoming an expert at those older applications in graduate school, when I landed my first job as a professional researcher, I simply couldn’t find what I needed across transcripts and produce the right kind of output using those tools.
After years of dealing with substandard tools, at Shapiro+Raj, my team of talented engineers and I built S+R AQuA™, our Advanced Qualitative Application. It’s a modern web app that does one thing really well: Search and browse research transcripts. Through a deep API-based integration with the industry’s leading transcript provider, Rev.com, we can order and receive transcripts without needing to expand our timelines. In AQuA, we can build smart searches that track research topics, scan for differences based on respondent profile, leverage machine learning models to find commonalities across large datasets, and produce video clips to bring the insights to life. AQuA has fundamentally changed how we approach qualitative analytics – both for historical research queries and for new, agile projects.
Is this the new golden age of transcripts? Perhaps; but with even better speech recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning on the horizon, I’m looking forward to the day when we can do so much more with qualitative data that the word “transcript” will seem antiquated (I’ll tell the stories about the hundreds-of-pages printouts and the new recruits will give me the same look as they did when I explained to them how we’d have to fax our discussion guides). Golden age or not, I’m still a convert to the value of transcripts and hope that you’ll be one too.
If you’d like more information on our transcript transformation, Rev.com wrote a thorough use case and customer portrait about Shapiro+Raj. Check it out at https://enterprise.rev.com/customer-stories/shapiro-raj
Shapiro+Raj
S+R is a research and strategy firm that uses social and behavioral sciences to solve the toughest business and marketing challenges. Our next-gen methods dig deep to unlock market-ready insights. Then our brand planners turn these into strategic marketplace actions that create brand evolution and innovation; customer experiences and loyalty; and new platforms for growth.
