We are conducting cross-country analysis, and we need your data as soon as possible.

May you please send us your post-intervention admin/teacher survey with either
updated survey variable names or filling in the legend of questions with your current
variable names. It is attached in this email for your convenience.

Northwestern appreciates all your hard work with survey collection, and we would like to
use all your data since you collected it from so many participants.

We would also like your interview data (transcripts, or at least key findings/quotes) from
participants since we also analyze qualitative data, and your January report (to track
progress on this project).

transcripts, or at least key findings/quotes

Here are some questions/feedback we have:

Final report
 Please provide the list of references you refer to in the report.
 Provide some details on the survey sample, such as how you recruited them and which
geographies they're from. Do they represent the people that are normally served by the
Special Olympics Rwanda, both geographically and in other characteristics?
Data
 We had some trouble linking your variable names from the teacher/admin file with the legend.
Could you fill out the attached excel sheet with the column for your variables so we can link
them? We're also attaching the cleaned data for your reference.
 Please provide data on how many times students participated in the activities. This would have
been collected from parents.
 Provide the approximate date range that the pre and post data were collected.
We would greatly appreciate it if you could address the above comments for the final report and data.

Transcribing and Editing Qualitative Material

Record exactly what is said, by whom, plus some indication of tone, pauses, body language, etc,
if necessary. Remember that one hour of recording can take 6-10 hours of transcription time.

Transcribing

Saunders & Lewis (2012, p. 188) suggest the following:

 Include details of the date, time and place where the data was collected.
 Anonymise both the organisation's and the respondents' names, using the alternatives
consistently.
 Use italics to signify questions asked.
  Use CAPITALS to highlight the names of the interviewer and the respondents.
 Use ... to show a pause in speech, the number of dots showing the relative length of the
pause.
 Use CAPITALS within the transcript to show those words that were spoken more loudly
than others.
 Use ( ) to enclose your description of what is happening such as the participant's tone of
voice, facial expressions or other visual cues.
 Make sure there are no typographical errors and that words are spelt consistently
throughout.
 Save each interview transcript as a separate file.

Editing
If necessary, you can edit the quotations. However, you need to make sure that you do not
misrepresent the meaning. There are also certain conventions that you need to follow (Richards
& Morse, 2007, pp. 208-209):

 Avoid misrepresenting what was said, and indicate where text has been removed - with
ellipses (...) - and where you have substituted words - by enclosing them in square
brackets ([..]).
 Delete any quoted material that is redundant. Ask yourself if each phrase is necessary. A
briefer quotation may be more powerful and much more relevant to your argument. If
you think the participant is implying something, suggest this in your interpretive
commentary.

You may also edit minor linguistic inaccuracies to facilitate reading, but if you decide to do so,
you should note this clearly at the first occurrence or in the method section (Dornyei, 2007, p.
297).

Be Careful!

Transcription: I think unless we want to become like other countries, where people have, you
know, democratic freedom.

Actual Words: I think unless we want to become like other countries, where people have no
democratic freedom.

Anonymity
Ethics codes prohibit researchers from disclosing personally identifying information about
participants.

Therefore, you should:

Quote participants without distinguishing them at all, for example:
Indeed, a comment by one of our managers illustrates some of these complex issues: [quote
follows without other attribution].
OR
Identify participants by demographic or other data:
At my age I think we know who we are and what we are. (Female participant, 69 years of age).

OR
Identify participants with letters (Participant A, Manager B), pseudonyms (Peter, Jenny), or by
role (Doctor, Patient, Customer).

Including Interviews in your Report

First you need to transcribe your interviews.
Then you can add the transcribed interviews to the appendix. This will demonstrate that the
interviews have actually taken place.

You should refer to the appendix when necessary:

The full transcript of this interview is included in Appendix 3 (on page 32).

The quotations are used to illustrate your research findings, and they need an introduction from
you which tells your reader how they illustrate that finding. So you need to:
 Say what the finding is
 Introduce the quotation by saying who said it and in what context
 Give the quotation
 Comment on the quotation by comparing it to other quotations from the same person,
other quotations from different people on the same topic, etc.

There are two main ways of presenting data to illustrate your analysis.
1. The first is to present your interpretation of findings and then follow with a quotation to
illustrate your description. This gives the reader the information to judge whether or not
your interpretation represents the data.
2. Alternatively, you may present a quotation followed by your interpretation. This may
show your ability to analyse in fine detail, but it could miss the overall picture.
3. Or, of course, a mixture of the two.

Quote explictly from your transcript to justify your choices:

Interviewee #3 stated that. "...the quality of education is enhanced by..." This was confirmed by
respondents 11, 14 and 7 others.
This point has been confirmed by 75% of the interviews with 15 percent not venturing an
opinion while 10% believed it is rather due to a stimulating curriculum.

Although you don’t need to include all your primary data, you should make it available in an
appendix, to which you should refer when necessary. For example:

Details of all the interview participants can be found in Appendix A, with transcripts of each
interview in Appendix B.

Appendices
Put here any data that was too extensive to incorporate earlier. In the text, for example, you
might have included the tables / graphs that give the results of your analyses. In the appendices,
you can give the raw data/transcripts to enable the reader to make their own analysis; plus
lengthy transcripts of interviews or texts, questionnaires, interview guides, texts, ethocs forms,
and so on.

Reporting Interview Data

Always attempt to contextualise quotations (Where did she say this? Who else was present?
What question was she answering? What did she say before this? How does it relate to your
overall argument?).
Make sure there is a good balance between your participants' quotations and your interpretation
of the words.
An overemphasis on the researcher's interpretations at the cost of participant quotes will leave
the reader in doubt as to just where the interpretations came from; an excess of quotes will cause
the reader to become lost in the morass of stories (Morrow, 2005, p. 256).

Paraphrase or summarise
When you have added the interviews to the appendix, you can then paraphrase or summarise
them in your report. Paraphrase is done as follows:

According to interviewee X (Appendix 1), the …

It became clear from an interview with Y that … (Appendix 1).

Quoting from interviews

If you literally copy the words of the interviewee, then you need to quote. Finding interesting
quotes is easier if you know how to get usable information out of the person during the
interview. That’s why you should conduct the interviews in a professional manner.
According to X (Personal communication, December 24, 2012) …

The following format is useful:

1. Short quotations in the text should be indicated by quotation marks.
2. Long quotes are set in an indented paragraph, or block quotes. (40 words is a common cut-off
point for ‘long’ quotes.)
3. There are no quotation marks around block quotes.
4. Block quotes may start with the continuation of a sentence from the text:
A customer in his fifties said that since the budget, life has become more difficult. …
5 .If the quote completes the sentence that introduces it, as in the example above, there is no
colon. If the quote follows a complete sentence, a colon can be used to show that the quote is an
illustration of that sentence.
One man claimed that ‘life is much harder now’.
One man made the claim: ‘life is much harder now.’
6. Square brackets - [..] - show the author’s editing of the quote, e.g. from ‘My company went
into liquidation five years ago’ to ‘My company went into liquidation [in France] five years
ago’.
7. Ellipses in square brackets […] can indicate omissions; ellipses without brackets indicate
hesitation or unfinished sentences. It is important, however, to distinguish between the author’s
selective omissions and the interviewee’s speech.
 ‘My company… you know, it went into liquidation five years ago in France.’ (Original
quotation, with ellipses showing the interviewee’s pause or hesitation.)
 ‘My company… you know, it went into liquidation […] in France.’(Hesitation, clearly
indicated.)
 ‘My company […] went into liquidation five years ago in France.’ (Shortening, clearly
indicated.)
8 .More specific conventions for showing pauses, tone of voice, etc. exist, but are not commonly
used in general writing.
9. Indicate who is speaking in the quotation, either introducing the speaker before the quote by
saying something like 'As John put it,' or 'Anne explained her reasons for this:', or attribute the
quote to the interviewee immediately afterwards, for example by writing their pseudonym or
[Interviewee 1] in square brackets.

APA Style

Quotations From Research Participants

When quoting research participants, use the same formatting as for other quotations: Present a
quotation of fewer than 40 words in quotation marks within the text ..., and present a quotation of
40 words or more in a block quotation .... Because quotations from research participants are part
of your original research, do not include them in the reference list or treat them as personal
communications; state in the text that the quotations are from participants.

Participant" Julia," a 32-year-old woman from Kigali, described her experiences as a new mother
as "simultaneously the best and hardest time of my life." Several other participants agreed,
describing the beginning of parenthood as "joyful," "lonely," and "intense." Julia and the other
participants completed interviews in their homes.

Examples

Interpretation followed by quotation

Campbell (1997) refers to an angle as a "perspective that dominates a story". In our study,
research and writing was reported as always being guided by an angle. It was described as a
"thrust" or "driving force" of an assignment - the new "twist" or "hook" that directs the story. An
angle was also described as a proposition or statement. In the following extract one journalist
relates this idea to the tragic events of the 11 September.

To start off with, there was the straight reporting of facts: a plane has hit the World Trade Center,
then a second plane has hit the WTC ... The default angle is "what has happened" ... (QC).

Most notably though, an angle was often presented as a hypothesis or conjecture about something
suspected of being the case, and this is one sense in which it can be understood as motivating
subsequent information seeking. QC continued:

But this soon develops, the new "angle" comes into play. I remember on the day that by the time
of the second plane, I and others were saying "This must be an act of terrorism, bemuse this is not
coincidental, an accident ...". So had I been writing the story, I would have begun building up
information to support my hypothesis that the acts of September 11 were terrorism. The standard
journalistic questions of who, what, why, when, how would have been asked about the events
against the backdrop of my hypothesis of terrorism.

And he summarises:

Essentially there is an angle to all news and features; it is really a working hypothesis that
translates the gathered facts, which may include some speculation, into a coherent account (QC).

(Attfield, S. & Dowell, J. (2003). Information seeking and use by newspaper journalists. Journal
of Documentation, 59(2), 87-204.)