Fact · Transcription
6hours per hour of interview
Gläser and Laudel found that verbatim transcription took an average of six hours for each hour of interview material in their own research projects, a figure Wollin-Giering and colleagues report in 2024.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“it took an average of six hours to transcribe one hour of interview material for verbatim transcription”
Automatic Transcription of English and German Qualitative Interviews, Susanne Wollin-Giering et al., Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 25(1), Art. 8, 2024, Section 5.3, Time spent.
Open the original- What it measures
- The authors review how long manual transcription has taken in qualitative research before they test automatic tools. The figure comes from Gläser and Laudel's 2010 book, reported second-hand by the authors.
- What it does not show
- One research team's experience, reported second-hand. Actual time depends on how much detail the transcript keeps, the audio quality and the transcriber's skill.