Polimorfismo del MHC en especies de cernícalos (Capítulo 6)

There are decisions to be made before and during the transcription process. The first decision I made was to do the transcriptions myself. I took this decision not because I felt I could make a better job of it but because I felt transcribing the interviews myself would give me a greater understanding not only of the contents of the transcripts but the sincerity that motivated the interview participants to say what they said. Transcribing the interviews myself helped me to pick out patterns and themes running through the interview data. As a result I was also able to check the interconnections between the different themes.

There are other decisions to be made as the transcription process gets under way. The following is a list of some of the decisions to be made just before transcription begins:

• how the page has to be organised,

• whether to do an orthographic or phonetic transcription, • should transcription reflect pronunciation?

• what paralinguistic and nonverbal information should be included and • what transcription convention should be used

• what should constitute basic units in the transcript—utterances, turns, or tone units? (Lapadat and Lindsay, 1999:67)

The decisions listed here are all important but for this study I focus on three; orthographic or phonetic transcription, transcription conventions used and the basic unit of transcription.

Kvale (2007) argues that the transcriber should decide whether interview conversations should be transcribed verbatim or transformed into a formal written style. This is an important consideration for this study since thematic analysis has been selected as the data analytic strategy. Braun and Clarke (2006:17) argue that using thematic analysis “at a minimum it requires a rigorous and thorough orthographic transcript - a “verbatim” account of all verbal utterances”. However, Braun and Clarke’s preference for an orthographic transcript needs to be considered in the light of Kvale (2007) and Downs’ (2010) argument that the researcher might need to decide on whether to produce a faithful transcription of the recording or a faithful representation of what was said in the interview. Kvale and Downs’ observations are particularly important for this study because there were instances when I had to translate what the interviewees said in Shona into English. How would my translations of Shona into English fit in with the objective of producing an orthographic transcription of the interview tapes? Translating sections of the interview from one language into another called for other decisions. I had to decide on whether to do literal translations or put across what I interpreted to be the meaning of what had been said by the interview participants. Making that decision also brought to the fore the important question of interpretation. Lapadat and Lindsay (1999) argue that the process of transcription is both interpretive and constructive and results in a reduced

version of the original recordings (Davidson, 2010). Sherrard (1997) cited in Meyrick (2006) also argues that totally accurate transcription is not possible because spoken language is highly fragmented such that when transcribing tapes the researcher has to interpret what the speaker actually said because during the interview there may be many distortions and false starts and the researcher has to edit leaving out slips and unimportant information. In this study the transcription process was interpretive in the sense that I was aware that the transcription I was doing would not in some instances reproduce the words recorded or the words said in the interview since as indicated earlier in some instances interview participants used Shona which I had to translate into English. Therefore during transcription I had to balance this realisation with the need to maintain a respectful stance towards words spoken by interviewees and avoid privileging my interpretations as transcriber. Downs (2010:110) emphasises this point when she argues that “interviewees have taken the time and trouble to utter those words and have handed them over in good faith. It thus behoves the researcher to be conscientious in handling them”.

Apart from decisions related to interpretation and construction I had to decide on the number of interviews to transcribe in full. As indicated in my discussion o f the sample size for this study, fourteen interviews with teachers and nine interviews with groups of four learners each were conducted. At the beginning it seemed impossible to transcribe all the interviews given that I had decided against using someone else to transcribe the interviews. Initially I decided to fully transcribe six teacher interviews and four children’ interviews. My difficulty with that decision was on how to make the selection of the interviews to fully transcribe. Since my sample represented five different population groups it meant each school type had to be

represented. I would then randomly select the interviews to transcribe from each school. However, after transcribing five interviews it became clear I did not have the moral resolve not to closely hear and reproduce what all teachers and learners had to say about language use in their classes. In the end I decided to transcribe fully all the interviews. I must say transcribing all the interviews was a painful experience but the rewards were immense. I gained a clearer picture of the participants’ voices and the nuances that distinguish them. I now turn to the mechanics of the transcription process.