Transcription

Today I transcribed one of my first research interviews from my PhD fieldwork.  It was 8000 words in total, 13 pages, and took just over 4 hours to do, which is pretty good going if I say so myself.  Because my methodology involves walk-and-talk interviews with people around their community there were a couple of issues - firstly with the wind making certain sections of the recording hard to hear, but I think I did okay.  Might have to invest in some sort of wind guard.  It was funny though, as I was transcribing I was walking round the area again in my head, and at certain points could hold an image of what we were looking at as we talked about certain topics.  I think the method has been quite useful so far because on numerous occasions questions have arisen from our surroundings, and in planning the route it allows me to use a number of features of the area as prompts for conversation.  It is early days but some of the early themes to arise from the data include:

Emptiness: one of the prevailiing senses is that the area is underused, and for such a densely populated part of the city, there are rarely many people out and about in their neighbourhood.

Territoriality: related to this is the fact that people do not seem to take responsibility or ownership over their neighbourhood.  Even though they live there they do not see it as their territory as such.  Hence they do not feel like the open spaces are theirs to defend from intrusion.

Permeability: the area feels very loose and diffuse.  A number of separate entities and very loosely bound together, and do not form a coherent whole.  It doesn’t help that the neighbourhood has been developed piecemeal over a number of years.  Of course being open and empty means that while connections between different parts of the area are weak, one can see how attractive it may be to criminals.

Another thing that has come up in the interviews so far is the way that people don’t need each other to go about their daily business; they have cars, computers, telephones, security, technology to help them.  The potential for community interaction is really quite small.  Perhaps the only time people interact with others in their community is when they have a need for something (i.e. resolve a parking dispute) but this community interaction is not a necessity itself.

In terms of crime and disorder, the topics that are underpinning my studies, the themes that have emerged so far from my interviews have a definite relationship and a part to play, but at this early stage I would not say that notions of security and safety are necessarily bound up in the way people perceive the public, and private, spaces of their neighbourhood. 

Tags: community, crime, emptiness, Neighbourhood, space