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We don’t notice that the person we are talking to has used a particular kind of language, or they have always laughed when a particular topic came up, or they paused for a very long time when considering one of our questions. We miss bits, we take up one thread of a possible line of thought and leave another dangling. For a start, we often don’t hear things when we are in the middle of a conversation.
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So no method of keeping records of conversations is perfect.īut I reckon that recordings are preferable to notes. My hunch is that takes longer to ignore a camera than an audio recorder, but either bit of research-kit can be a serious conversation stopper. Recording devices, on the other hand, can be pretty off-putting to the participant(s), and it may take a while for them to forget that they are there. Or it might be an audio recording or even a film/video.Įach of these methods has their own strengths and weaknesses of course – it’s hard to look at people and follow the conversation if you are taking notes, if you leave the notes till after the conversation you’ve forgotten half of it, and it’s hard with any form of note-taking to get down extended verbatim speech. This might be in the form of notes taken at the time, or after the event. Rather than rely on an imperfect memory, researchers always, if at all possible, find ways to record their conversations. Now the important thing in research is that you must re-live this interview experience afterwards. I didn’t set up the interview properly, the person didn’t know me well enough, I asked the wrong questions, I interrupted or I didn’t listen enough for clues about where the conversation was going… And if I do, this is almost always because of something I did. It’s rarely the case for example that I leave an interview thinking that it was a complete waste of time. They’ll usually have something interesting to say. One of the great pleasures about researching is that you get to talk to lots of different people.