Most IRB protocols get sent back for revision on the data security and management sections, and within those sections, transcription is the specific area where protocols most frequently fall short. The reasons are consistent: researchers describe their interview methodology in careful detail, specify their analysis software, and then write a single sentence about transcription that doesn't address who's doing it, what compliance standards the vendor meets, how files will be transferred, where they'll be stored, or when they'll be deleted.

A common setup in community-based Latino health research: bilingual interviews with first, second, and 1.5-generation participants, conducted in English or Spanish depending on each participant's preference, at community organizations across a Midwestern city. The recordings come back mixed. Some are fully in Spanish, some fully in English, some switching mid-interview as participants reach for the language that fits the concept they're describing. One transcriptionist flags the mixed recordings as too difficult. Another delivers transcripts where heritage speaker constructions have been silently corrected to standard Spanish. The researcher is now reviewing every transcript manually before analysis can begin. This is the predictable result of sending US Hispanic research recordings, whether from one-on-one interviews, focus groups, or Zoom, Teams, and Webex sessions, to transcription services built for standard, monolingual speech.

Focus groups generate some of the most demanding audio in qualitative research. Six to twelve people talking, sometimes over each other, sometimes in a room with bad acoustics, sometimes over a Zoom call with background noise from a home environment. Getting that audio into a clean, usable transcript is where a lot of research budgets and timelines get tested. Not every transcription service handles this well, and the right one often depends on the kind of focus group you're actually running.