Transcription is an integral process in the qualitative analysis of language data and is widely employed in basic and applied research across a number of disciplines and in professional practice fields. Yet, methodological and theoretical issues associated with the transcription process have received scant attention in the research literature. In this article, the authors present a cross-disciplinary conceptual review of the place of transcription in qualitative inquiry, in which the nature of transcription and the epistemological assumptions on which it rests are considered. The authors conclude that transcription is theory laden; the choices that researchers make about transcription enact the theories they hold and constrain the interpretations they can draw from their data. Because it has implications for the interpretation of research data and for decision making in practice fields, transcription as a process warrants further investigation.
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