Content area
Full Text
Digital technology has provided a new way of recording qualitative interviews, surpassing the clarity, usability and storage capabilities of conventional tape recorders. Ritin Fernandez and Rhonda Griffiths examine a technological resource that pervades modern social life and which can be used effectively for digitally recording interviews for qualitative research
key words
* Interview
* Digital recording
* Computer application
* Audio
Introduction
Qualitative interviewing is a method of data collection that is widely used in health research, including nursing, allied health and social work (Wellard and McKenna 2001). While interviews have mainly been used to provide the whole or majority of the data needed in qualitative research (Patton 2002). interviews of an exploratory nature have also been conducted to determine suitable questions for the development of questionnaires (Polit and Beck 2004). With the increasing use of mixed methods research, qualitative interviews are now being used increasingly for data triangulation, to augment the comprehensiveness and validity of a single study and to obtain further information on interesting or unexpected findings (Patton 2002).
To capture the content of the interview, interviewers generally take notes, as it is not usually possible to write a complete transcript of the conversation. However, taking notes has been reported to distract the interviewer from the focus of the conservation, resulting in loss of critical information (Britten 1995). In addition, the notes taken may not provide adequate information if the researcher is required to review the original conversation. Audio or video recording of interviews is another method commonly used (Byrne 2001) to assist the researcher in recalling discussion during data analysis (Wellard and McKenna 2001). When compared with taking notes of a conversation, these methods significantly decrease the likelihood of error or misinterpretation of the responses during data analysis. It is well known that interviewing is a time-consuming process (Britten 1995) and the ability to re-obtain any lost data is minimal. Therefore high quality recording using reliable equipment remains vital (Britten 1995). This article focuses on a technological resource that pervades modern social life and which can be used effectively for audio recording of interviews for qualitative research.
Audio recording of interviews
Analogue recording
Audio recording of interviews is commonly undertaken using traditional analogue recording equipment such as tape recorders (Byrne 2001)....