Using realtime transcription to do member-checking during interviews

CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation), a realtime transcription service also known as "open captioning," can serve as a time-efficient and cost-effective tool for interviews and member-checks with technologically savvy populations such as those in engineering education research. CART can provide verbatim or near-verbatim full-text captures of even rapid technical conversations. CART professionals are widely available at universities as an accessibility provision for d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Several engineering education research pilots indicate that CART can change the researcher/subject dynamic and reduce or eliminate the need for a separate member-check session. This paper explains the procedures and considerations behind employing CART for a qualitative study, including setup details for realtime transcription and the tradeoffs of pursuing such an approach. Following these pragmatic details, we investigate the implications of this technique on researcher/subject positionality and the role of transcription in research methodology. We also introduce the idea of "grounded indigenous coding" as a methodological innovation, whereby realtime transcription enables participants to reflect on the words they have just spoken ("indigenous coding") while remaining grounded in the verbatim precision of a transcript.