{"id":5032,"date":"2018-03-26T13:26:06","date_gmt":"2018-03-26T17:26:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/?p=5032"},"modified":"2018-05-06T23:42:25","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T03:42:25","slug":"behind-the-scenes-of-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/2018\/03\/26\/behind-the-scenes-of-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind the Scenes of Research"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\"Behind\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t <\/div>\n
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Throughout the first semester, Jan Plan, and the first half of the second semester, I have been organizing and formatting the database for the Globally Elite Research Project. It has been pretty mindless work for me because I like being organized and providing structure. I know it is not the most intriguing topic, but I have found ways to make it more fun in order motivate myself. <\/span><\/p>

My first responsibility as part of the research team began in the first semester, when I was asked to format all the fieldnotes and transcriptions people had done of the interviews. When doing research, Professor Adam Howard has researchers conduct interviews and record the audio, later to be transcribed. It was interesting to see the different styles of transcription. Even if the transcriber didn\u2019t put his or her name on the interview, most of the time I could still tell who had done it because everyone has their own style, their own way of wring \u201cyeah\u201d\/\u201dya\u201d\/\u201dyah,\u201d and their own way of stumbling through a part of the audio that isn\u2019t clear. I moved pretty quickly in the beginning because all I did was look for spelling errors which would be underlined in red, format the margins to 2.5 inches on either side, put page numbers in the top right hand corner, and change the font to 12 pt Times New Roman. When I got to transcriptions for the school in Chile, I started to slow down because there were a lot of parts that the transcriber either couldn\u2019t understand (because the audio was in Spanish) or couldn\u2019t decipher (because of background commotion). There were so many parts left out that I started listening to the audio recordings as I scrolled through the transcription. After Chile, I began skimming every transcription and found some words and phrases that didn\u2019t necessarily have spelling or grammatical errors that would be underlined in red, but just didn\u2019t make sense in the context of the interview. So, then I began to listen to the audio as I read through the transcriptions and ended up rewriting big portions of some. <\/span><\/p>

Professor Howard had also asked me to fill out the key for all the participants in the research project so that all their information would be in one place. Going into this organizational project, I thought it would be a really quick fix, but it\u2019s actually taken me a lot longer than I thought, which shows that even seemingly mindless tasks take considerable amounts of time, and on top of that are essential to all parts of the research process. For the student participants, I needed to find their age, nationality, and grade\/level. I had to go back through the now-transcribed interviews and search in each one. Age was the easiest to find as I could search the document for \u201cyears,\u201d \u201cold,\u201d \u201cage,\u201d \u201cteen,\u201d or \u201c1\u201d and I would usually find it. Grade\/level was a little tricky because often a student wouldn\u2019t directly say what grade they were in but would reference a previous year and I would have to assume that they were in the year beyond it. Or the school curriculum would change based on the grade, so I could deduce the grade from that. Sometimes the students would mention the age and year of a younger sibling and I could figure out their age and grade based on much older they were than their sibling. It wasn\u2019t as difficult as this writing makes it seem, but it wasn\u2019t a piece of cake like I had thought it would be.<\/span><\/p>

The experience of managing and formatting data may not seem particularly exciting, but it is interesting to understand just how much time seemingly easy tasks take. Writing out a transcription for a 45 minute recording takes me about 4 hours. I\u2019m probably on the slower side, but just thinking about how much time has been spent transcribing astounds me. The more invested I have become in the thoroughness of my editing, the more time it takes, but it also gives me a weird sense of satisfaction when I finish editing each transcription. <\/span><\/p>\t\t<\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \t <\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":9065,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"builder_content":"\"Behind \n

Throughout the first semester, Jan Plan, and the first half of the second semester, I have been organizing and formatting the database for the Globally Elite Research Project. It has been pretty mindless work for me because I like being organized and providing structure. I know it is not the most intriguing topic, but I have found ways to make it more fun in order motivate myself. <\/p>

My first responsibility as part of the research team began in the first semester, when I was asked to format all the fieldnotes and transcriptions people had done of the interviews. When doing research, Professor Adam Howard has researchers conduct interviews and record the audio, later to be transcribed. It was interesting to see the different styles of transcription. Even if the transcriber didn\u2019t put his or her name on the interview, most of the time I could still tell who had done it because everyone has their own style, their own way of wring \u201cyeah\u201d\/\u201dya\u201d\/\u201dyah,\u201d and their own way of stumbling through a part of the audio that isn\u2019t clear. I moved pretty quickly in the beginning because all I did was look for spelling errors which would be underlined in red, format the margins to 2.5 inches on either side, put page numbers in the top right hand corner, and change the font to 12 pt Times New Roman. When I got to transcriptions for the school in Chile, I started to slow down because there were a lot of parts that the transcriber either couldn\u2019t understand (because the audio was in Spanish) or couldn\u2019t decipher (because of background commotion). There were so many parts left out that I started listening to the audio recordings as I scrolled through the transcription. After Chile, I began skimming every transcription and found some words and phrases that didn\u2019t necessarily have spelling or grammatical errors that would be underlined in red, but just didn\u2019t make sense in the context of the interview. So, then I began to listen to the audio as I read through the transcriptions and ended up rewriting big portions of some. <\/p>

Professor Howard had also asked me to fill out the key for all the participants in the research project so that all their information would be in one place. Going into this organizational project, I thought it would be a really quick fix, but it\u2019s actually taken me a lot longer than I thought, which shows that even seemingly mindless tasks take considerable amounts of time, and on top of that are essential to all parts of the research process. For the student participants, I needed to find their age, nationality, and grade\/level. I had to go back through the now-transcribed interviews and search in each one. Age was the easiest to find as I could search the document for \u201cyears,\u201d \u201cold,\u201d \u201cage,\u201d \u201cteen,\u201d or \u201c1\u201d and I would usually find it. Grade\/level was a little tricky because often a student wouldn\u2019t directly say what grade they were in but would reference a previous year and I would have to assume that they were in the year beyond it. Or the school curriculum would change based on the grade, so I could deduce the grade from that. Sometimes the students would mention the age and year of a younger sibling and I could figure out their age and grade based on much older they were than their sibling. It wasn\u2019t as difficult as this writing makes it seem, but it wasn\u2019t a piece of cake like I had thought it would be.<\/p>

The experience of managing and formatting data may not seem particularly exciting, but it is interesting to understand just how much time seemingly easy tasks take. Writing out a transcription for a 45 minute recording takes me about 4 hours. I\u2019m probably on the slower side, but just thinking about how much time has been spent transcribing astounds me. The more invested I have become in the thoroughness of my editing, the more time it takes, but it also gives me a weird sense of satisfaction when I finish editing each transcription. <\/p>","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5032"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9065"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5032"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5053,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5032\/revisions\/5053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}