Ruth’s Sociology Resources Blog

Many apologies for the lack of posts over the last few weeks - I am deep in the middle of data collection for my PhD research and it is definitely keeping me busy.  Although all the methods textbooks tell you that qualitative research using informal interviews is time-consuming because of a long interviews and travelling time, what most of them don’t point out is that as well, as the lengthy analysis of huge amounts of data, it also takes HOURS and HOURS to transcribe all the tape recordings before you embark on in-depth analysis!  For every hour of interview I tape it takes me about 9 hours to transcribe - that’s a lot of time.
I am however enjoying the research process hugely - listening to people talking about their lives and then trying to puzzle out the links and patterns of things which people’s experiences do and don’t have in common is fascinating and my brain  is constantly whirring trying to work things out.

Hopefully I will be back to posting regularly in a few weeks time as data collection comes to an end.