What Are the Different Types of Research that Can Benefit from Transcription?

Anyone who has done even a modicum of research for dissertations, presentations, market research purposes and the like can attest that research is often a time-consuming process that saps away at one’s time until one is left only with the impression that he or she has sunk a large amount of time in something that may even prove to be pointless.

Then again, who says research has to be so time-consuming and exhausting? The enterprising researcher knows best when to fold and when to not fold, when to push forward and when to take a small step back in order to prepare for the next moves. Most of all, the enterprising researchers knows best when and how to work smart; more specifically, by using transcriptions.

The benefits of using transcriptions have been widely noted throughout, and for good reason. Transcriptions really do make everyone’s lives easier. How so?

Before one answer the above question, one must first know the two main types of data that research gathers.

Many different kinds of barometers exist to categorize data but veterans in the field generally acknowledge two distinct yet overlapping categories: qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative data often seek to solidify the human experience and are often subjective in nature while quantitative data seek to give definite answers to questions grounded in solid numbers and “hard” facts.

Researches normally encountered in this day and age such as academic and medical researches usually incorporate a seamless mix of these qualitative and quantitative data, such that it is often hard to truly separate these two types of data.

Here is where transcriptions come in. Research transcriptions allow researchers to focus on specific data and identify what subtypes or subgroups they belong to, and then further classify them according to their needs and specifications in order for them to reach the answers they are looking for:

• Market researchers looking to gather crucial information regarding the public’s stance towards their products and thus create a full picture of a certain market for their clients would do very well to use transcriptions for their every data-gathering session, because to not do so would mean that they would soon get swamped by a seemingly never-ending gush of data from the public. Features such as speaker labeling and video captioning and subtitling will make their tasks even easier. No more waking up in the middle of the night after having nightmares about a crowd of people surrounding you and talking only about one thing: Product X.
• Students, professors, and everybody else inhabiting the academia who are in the process of writing their theses and dissertations and research projects would find transcriptions of their interviews and focus group discussions invaluable in getting the right data for use in their academic work. With academic transcriptions on hand, they would be able to easily sort out and differentiate data from each other and accordingly code data with unerring accuracy, and thence pass their academic work with flying colors. No more losing sleep over trying to transcribe weeks’ worth of audio while struggling to juggle school and personal life (and failing miserably at both).
• Medical researchers would also find transcriptions an indispensable part of their work. Skilled transcribers from a high-quality transcription service would be able to accurately transcribe audio festered with dozens of medical terms and lingo, and even understand obscure terms that might leave some doctors and clinicians shaking their head in frustration, for they themselves never even knew such a term existed. This would allow researchers to simplify the data-gathering process and go straight to making sense of the myriad of data that they are now in possession of.
• Sermon transcriptions provide a ton of benefits. Not only does it allow pastors and preachers and holy men and women of all denominations to further spread their faith, it also lets scholars study sermons made by others, create new ideas with which to further propagate their religion, and even reach those members of the flock who are unable to attend religious services.
• It would be no exaggeration to say that legal transcriptions are the bread and butter of courtrooms. Without them, judges cannot review court proceedings and thus mete out the appropriate judgment as dictated by law, and landmark cases concerning important laws would be even more prone to misinterpretation and twisting of meaning, thus potentially impacting even some of the most basic human rights.

Really, just about any type of research – whether academic or medical, legal or marketing, whether for use in the academe or in the professional world – benefits from transcription, for transcriptions provide researchers the means to truly focus on making sense of the varied data that they receive, for data is always not so simple as ABCD or 1234.