Advice for thesis writers from past writers:

2012:

Stay on campus for J-term, starting from the first possible date.  Past writers have written most of their thesis at this time as the only other people on campus are thesis writers and there are very few distractions.

Collect data at the lowest possible level of analysis and consolidate it later. In my thesis, for example, I was looking at photo albums. I analyzed the data at the album-level rather than at the individual photo level, which made the statistics much more difficult. It would have been nice to have had the individual photo-level data, even though i was primarily interested in an album-level analysis.

TRANSCRIPTION:

“I'd say do it yourself....it's free, you get to know your data better, and you don't have the problem of mistranslations and whatnot.”

"I didn't pay for transcriptions, and I had 20-something interviews to transcribe. I would say do it yourself, especially over the summer before school starts. It's mindless work that makes you feel productive! I didn't get a chance to do it over the summer, but I did my transcriptions to take breaks from essays and readings for my classes."

I would advise everyone to proofread transcripts as sometimes transcribers make huge mistakes (like writing "Asian" instead of "Haitian") that you wouldn't catch otherwise. I had a transcriber that left out at least five pages of text. I hired students and paid them $10 per hour of anticipated work (for example, $40 for 1 hour of audio) and gave them a week to do it in, though most spent a day or two on it. They almost never followed my formatting directions and almost never turned in the transcript on time.

I just sent emails over my lists asking if people would be willing to help me transcribe some of my thesis interviews.  I set a rate of $20/interview (each was 30-45 minutes).

I used Datalyst. They cost 90 cents per minute if you don't care about how long it takes (they say it could be up to two weeks, but it's usually done in 4-5 days at most) or 1.10 per minute if you'd like it expedited. They aren't amazing, but I'd say 75% of the time they got it mostly right. It's cheap and easy, but it does come with the added cost of having to listen through some interviews on your own later, which I think was actually helpful anyway. Alternatively, you can also complain and see if they'll re-do the transcription for you. Some transcribers are substantially better than others. Anyway, probably 3 stars out of 5.