How long does it take to transcribe interviews?
Rule of thumb 1 to 8
Assume that you will need about 5 to 8 times the duration of the interview as transcription time. This applies to well-recorded individual interviews, average typing skills, simple rules for transcription and proofreading at the end. We have measured it: Our empirical studies have shown a mean value of 1 in 6.3 (SD = 1.5). This means that our respondents needed around 6 hours and 20 minutes to type up each hour of audio material from an interview recording. The fastest transcription speed we measured was around 1 to 3. This person only managed the record speed because they practiced this technique professionally and only typed for an hour – so they were in a sprint. But transcribing entire interviews is more like a marathon. So don’t underestimate the time you will need.
Big influencing factor: your own typing speed
Whether you work with a three-finger search system or blindly with a ten-finger system has a major influence on the expected processing time. The good thing is that you can train your own typing speed and become significantly faster. But only if this is tackled in good time. Because this requires a lot of practice time. So if you are about to submit a transcription, this time optimization strategy is unfortunately out of the question.
Nevertheless, you can quickly and easily check where you stand. Simply check your own typing speed here.
From 200 keystrokes you can count yourself among the “fast” typists.
Transcription rules: The more complex, the slower
Transcription rules define whether an “um”, a pause or a pitch change must be transcribed or not. The complexity of the transcription rules depends on the requirements resulting from the method, research object and subject. The rules you have to follow are usually determined by your research method. E.g. simple rules are usually used in qualitative content analysis and more complex ones in sequence analysis methods. The more details that need to be recorded, the longer it takes to type. So far, so trivial.
The influence of the rules is immense. With a complex rule system such as the GAT2 basic transcript, 18 hours per interview hour must be expected, even with appropriate practice, and even 30 to 60 hours for a GAT2 fine transcript. Other projects, e.g. as part of a qualitative content analysis, use less elaborate transcription rules. We carried out the test above with these and ended up with around 6 hours 20 minutes. You can find these rules in quotable form here in our practice book on p. 22 ff.
