Analog in a digital world

Last year when took P&L 966 and conducted hour-long interviews with 3 different students, many of my family members desperately tried to convince me that I needed some sort of software that would make this dissertation process easier. My professor had stated that it would probably take 4 hours to transcribe an hour-long interview; in my reality (borderline perfectionist), it was more like 10.

I resisted. I felt that I got to know my data really well and I learned even more from the interviews when I spent hours and hours listening to their words and making inferences from the inflections in their voices, the pauses, and the statements themselves.

Then my daughter became a toddler and I took a new job on campus. My life is so busy! I took this class to learn more about digital tools that could be used in the qualitative research process. I mean, quantitative research is so easy - you just dump your data into SPSS, right? (heh)

After taking this class, I still feel as if I need to do all the transcription myself. I still believe that this is an important part of the process, especially in terms of the understanding the nature of what I am trying to understand. I am going to investigate how cultural brokering -- when Latinas are in the position of having to culturally and linguistically translate for their parents or guardians -- helps in the transition to and persistence in college. I am super excited about my topic and want to make sure that my dissertation is a high-quality project.

I am very excited by ExpressScribe, especially since Lauren figured out how to use hotkeys on a Mac. :-) I think this will actually be a HUGE time saver. During the transcription process, I tried to use ExpressScribe but it was kind of more trouble than it was worth without the hotkeys. If I can quickly and easily use the keys to start and stop the tape, I can type a whole lot faster!

I actually think I might keep this blog (deleting that awful video of course, geez I thought I lost my NY accent, but not so!!) for processing my dissertation journey. I am a writer at heart, and I think this process of putting my thoughts out there is actually really beneficial to sharpening and shaping my topic and processes. I am also planning on using Google Docs/Notebook and possibly Zotero. I've been on Gmail since the beginning, and I'm only now learning how powerful some of the Google tools are.

One of the challenges is having a Mac. There are so many cool tools out there that just aren't written for Macs. I wonder about the people at Apple - aren't any of them qualitative folks? They are so innovative with all the i products, you would think that they would hop on the qual bandwagon. I may investigate this further.

In my current job, I see that there may be surveys in my future and so I may become friends with SPSS (which, of course, doesn't run on a Mac). Surveys are a good way of obtaining data, but I just don't always trust quantitative data!

I'm glad I took this course and will have access to the researchosu blog. I think it was helpful to learn more about these tools. Thanks, Lauren! Now onto research!