Research Interview Transcription

The following information was compiled by Sue Stanton to assist trainees and researchers in RHSC who may need transcription services.

  1. Scriptastic (http://scriptastic.ca/)

Owner: Elaine Walkden

Address and email: see website

Notes:

  1. The company has been in business since 2005
  2. Elaine is a very effective and prompt administrator of the service, and provided receipts of payment at my request [see (e) below for Mully’s]
  3. Rate was about $2.10 per minute of audio time but you can negotiate a bulk rate if you have many transcriptions. I paid a bulk rate of $1.95 per minute of audio time.
  4. Transcribers are experienced and pretty accurate.
  5. Turnaround time averaged 5 days so slightly faster than Mully’s only because Elaine has a larger business and just contracts more transcribers as needed to meet increasing demands.

 

  1. Mully’s Transcription

Owner: Sue Parker

Address: 203 – 1738 55A Street, Delta,  B. C. V4M 0A9

Email: sparker9@telus.net

Notes:

  1. Sue works part-time for the School of Nursing largely as a research transcriber. She is experienced, efficient and professional, and knows the expectations for qualitative research transcription.
  2. She works in an office in Koerner down one of the north-south corridors (think it’s the one closed to the OSOT office – eastern one) so it is easy to meet her and put audio files on a USB for her transfer to her laptop while you wait (see ** below).
  3. When I worked with her in 2016  Sue P’s rate was $22 per hour. Although initially I wondered if that would end up costing me more than the Scriptastic ‘per minute of audio’ rate, Sue was recommended to me by a UBC Rehab Sciences PhD student who indicated most of her 1 hour interviews took approx. 5 hours to transcribe. Overall, I felt the cost of Sue P’s interview transcriptions were less/slightly less than the bulk rate charged by Scriptastic. Of course transcription time can vary considerably e.g. when interviewer/interviewee has/have thick accents or the words used are not typical.
  4. Generally turnaround time varied from a 2-10 days (latter only once) with most in the 5-7 day range. Sue’s availability varies with the nursing faculty demands for transcription.
  5. At my request, Sue dated and signed invoices to provide evidence of payment, and emailed scanned it to me quickly.

 

**

FYI, others told me they used Drop Box for transferring files to transcribers; however, since Drop Box is on Uncle Sam’s server which violates UBC’s ORS policy, use of the free Wetransfer website (https://wetransfer.com/about) is a file transfer option that is located in Netherlands so was an alternative I have used. There are free and paid options with different specifications. I see that Wetransfer recently added offices in the US so users should now confirm that the file transfer is still going through the Netherlands website so they don’t inadvertently violate the ORS Patriot Act policy re not putting confidential data US servers.