Transcribing research interviews
Hi Everyone,
I checked the tags and poked around the site (which I've been watching for a long time), but didn't find anything on this topic, so here goes; hope it's not repetitive.
During a bout of [what I'd like to believe is uncharacteristic] hubris, I decided that I was going to transcribe all of my interviews for my [qualitative, social science] dissertation myself. Now reality is checking me, and the hours I used to spend at my desk hunched over my keyboard are starting to feel more like a form of procrastination than evidence of admirable self-discipline. (Transcribing, after all, doesn't require anywhere near as much thinking as the stuff I would be doing if I paid someone else to transcribe for me.)
For my master's thesis, I transcribed my own interviews until I developed terrible shoulder pain. Then I paid a professional transcription firm a small fortune to do a handful of the remaining files. When I realized that this was going to bleed me dry, and very quickly, I took a colleague's advice and hired someone on GetAFreelancer.com. She was a total flake, so ultimately I replaced her (again using GetAFreelancer) with a student looking for extra cash. She did great job for half the price of the professionals.
Since then, however, freelancer-finding sites seem to have proliferated exponentially, and I'm having a hard time figuring out if any are discernibly better or worse or more or less legit than others. I also really feel like I got lucky with my transcriptionist last time, and that things could very easily have gone poorly. So I'm wondering if anyone has had luck with a particular site or service, or has any words of warning based on his or her experience hiring a transcriptionist, or has any other ideas about ways to do this.
Thanks in advance!
I checked the tags and poked around the site (which I've been watching for a long time), but didn't find anything on this topic, so here goes; hope it's not repetitive.
During a bout of [what I'd like to believe is uncharacteristic] hubris, I decided that I was going to transcribe all of my interviews for my [qualitative, social science] dissertation myself. Now reality is checking me, and the hours I used to spend at my desk hunched over my keyboard are starting to feel more like a form of procrastination than evidence of admirable self-discipline. (Transcribing, after all, doesn't require anywhere near as much thinking as the stuff I would be doing if I paid someone else to transcribe for me.)
For my master's thesis, I transcribed my own interviews until I developed terrible shoulder pain. Then I paid a professional transcription firm a small fortune to do a handful of the remaining files. When I realized that this was going to bleed me dry, and very quickly, I took a colleague's advice and hired someone on GetAFreelancer.com. She was a total flake, so ultimately I replaced her (again using GetAFreelancer) with a student looking for extra cash. She did great job for half the price of the professionals.
Since then, however, freelancer-finding sites seem to have proliferated exponentially, and I'm having a hard time figuring out if any are discernibly better or worse or more or less legit than others. I also really feel like I got lucky with my transcriptionist last time, and that things could very easily have gone poorly. So I'm wondering if anyone has had luck with a particular site or service, or has any words of warning based on his or her experience hiring a transcriptionist, or has any other ideas about ways to do this.
Thanks in advance!