Editor’s note: Pierre Belisle is president of Belisle Marketing Ltd., a Cantley, Quebec, research and consulting firm.

Qualitative researchers are under increasing pressure to deliver morning-after analyses with little opportunity to examine the data. How can they improve judgments when clients have no time and no budgets for proper analysis? One technique holds promise: digital recording of qualitative interviews.

Digital recording - not to be confused with voice recognition (which may, however, be the next big advance for qualitative researchers) - is the process by which a sound is broken up into minute parts, called samples. Each of these, and there are thousands per second, is assigned a numeric value. Once digitized in this fashion, the sound can be stored on a computer hard drive, like any other digital information.

Most any multimedia laptop fitted with a microphone can now become your cassette tape, with either the moderator or an assistant controlling the recording process.

What are the benefits?

The benefits of digital recording occur at the analysis stage, and later. Recording digitally on a computer hard drive - a fast, random-access device - allows virtually instantaneous recall of all parts of the audio record, whenever they were recorded. The introduction, the discussion at the 30-minute mark, and the insightful comments at the very end of the group discussion are all equally accessible without fast-forwarding or rewinding.

The benefits of instantaneous recall should be obvious: analysis is faster, easier, and possibly in greater depth, because instantaneous recall frees the analyst to listen to the recordings carefully.

Even more exciting: it is possible to drop markers or "audio sticky notes" into the sound file whenever an interesting or significant thought is spoken at the time of recording. It is then possible, when playing back, to jump to any of these markers and listen to the interview from this point on. Rather than wading through miles of tape, the analyst jumps immediately to any spot on the audio record, like jumping to a specific track on an audio CD.

How it works

During the interview

As the group starts, the recorder - moderator or assistant - clicks on the "record" button on the computer screen. Whenever the recorder hears something noteworthy, he or she:

  • jots down one or two words to remember the gist of the comments;
  • hits the "M(ark)" key or space bar on the computer.

When the interview or group ends, the recorder stops the recording and saves the file, with the markers embedded in the sound file.

At the analysis stage

When the analyst calls up the file on the laptop, he or she will see a screen similar to Fig. 1: a waveform of the interview, with superimposed markers (the sticky notes) showing "the good bits" - actually, the end of a good bit - identified by the time when the "M" key was pressed, to the thousandth of a second.

The analyst will work with two tools:

1. The computer sound file of the interview, complete with the audio sticky notes.

2. The recorder’s handwritten shorthand description of these audio highlights, jotted down at the time of the interview.

To listen to the "good bits" at playback, the analyst will:

- position the cursor just to the left of the marker with the mouse;

- hit the space bar.

Voila! The sound file begins playing from that point in the interview forward. To play the next "good bit," repeat the process.

Mouse commands or simple keyboard shortcuts make navigation to any part of the sound file easy and almost instantaneous.

Alternatively, it is possible to navigate to the various "good bits" by using keyboard shortcuts. For instance, the CTRL-RIGHT ARROW combination will advance the cursor to the next marker, while the PAGE UP command moves the cursor back by five seconds or so. The space bar begins playback. Using a combination of only these commands would allow the analyst almost instantaneous recall of all the significant sound bites, in much less time than it would take to listen to a complete tape of the interview.

There is more. It is possible to view a separate window (see Fig. 2) listing all the markers showing the "hot tracks." By cross-referencing the recorder’s hand-written notes, you can navigate directly to each clip. So, for instance, if the Recorder had jotted down beside their fifteenth keypress "15. good recap," it would be possible to listen to this citation simply by pressing on the right-arrow marker to the left of the fifteen marker. The efficiencies involved cannot be overstated.

There is more: it is possible, and easy, to accumulate the "hot tracks" in a playlist, and to instruct the program to create an "interview highlights" recording.

At the presentation or reporting stage

There are benefits to digital recording at later stages of the research as well. Because the audio record is now on the desktop, consultants can do things that they could not before (well, not very easily) with analog data, such as:

  • embedding sound clips in the report;
  • embedding sound clips in the presentation;
  • "cutting and pasting" them into a separate file of "hits" that can be e-mailed to clients, or burned into a CD-ROM; and
  • using the playlist to indicate to a video editor which clips should be included in the video report.

Time-saver

Digital recording is a time-saver and value enhancer whose time has come. It allows consultants to work directly with the subtleties of the audio record and puts it right on their desktop. Ultimately, it should lead to better research, at a lower cost.