How to edit interview and survey responses

When you're editing interview and survey responses, you need to strike a balance between accuracy (so your research remains trustworthy) and clarity (so your readers get the maximum benefit from the information you're sharing). You'll need to carefully consider factors such as clarity, ambiguity, anonymity, and what to do about potentially offensive and harmful responses. Punctuation marks like square brackets and ellipses enable you to make necessary changes to your research participants' words while remaining transparent and ethical.

So, you've conducted some interviews or focus groups and transcribed the content, or you have a body of text collected from responses to a survey. You've written up your research in a report and want to include quotations from the interviews, focus groups or survey to provide qualitative evidence of your findings. But how do you edit interview and survey responses while staying true to the respondents' words?

The balancing act of editing interview and survey responses

Editing interview or survey responses for publication is a balancing act where you need to keep two groups in mind:

• The respondents, interviewees or participants deserve to have their words presented accurately (especially if they will be named rather than anonymous).
• The readers of your report need to be able to easily understand those words, so that the report conveys its message as effectively and as powerfully as possible.

I've edited a lot of interview and survey responses for both academic and non-academic (e.g. non-profits') research reports, and I've seen many examples of what works and what can be confusing for readers.

This post looks at how to balance the two imperatives above – in other words, how to take potentially messy transcriptions and survey responses and make them easily understandable for a reader needing quality information in a hurry. First we'll look at the question of why it can be hard to present interview and survey responses for publication. Then we'll walk through five important principles to help you do it well.

I’ll provide lots of specific examples of how to edit interview and survey responses for clarity and transparency. However, this is a complex topic with many edge cases and exceptions. If you’d like dedicated support with a specific case, do get in touch!

Why can it be difficult to edit interview and survey responses?

People don't speak 'Report-ese' – they speak colloquially and idiomatically. They also don't always know what they're going to say when they start speaking a sentence, so they can meander as they find the words to express what's in their head. They may also change their minds, backtrack, lose their train of thought or use different words from what they actually mean.

Furthermore, when we speak, tone, inflection, pauses and body language do a huge amount of the work of communication, so we can get away with being much more sloppy than we do when we write.

Here are some specific examples of why it can be difficult to edit interview and survey responses.

Extra, missing or overlapping words

Because people don't always use formal language when they speak, interview and focus group transcriptions are commonly littered with 'filler' words and sounds like 'so', 'like', 'um', 'er', 'kind of', 'sort of', 'well' and so on. Words will be missing too, and many sentences won't be grammatically complete, so functional words such as 'and', 'is', 'because', 'to', 'the' and 'so' might be missing.

When it comes to survey responses, you're likely to get fewer filler words but potentially more missing words.

Additionally, in a focus group, you might get multiple people speaking at once or in quick succession, which can make text tricky to transcribe accurately or understand when it's read back.

Funky spelling and grammar

You'll also face other challenges, such as spelling mistakes or ambiguous grammar (in my experience, people's spoken grammar is usually better than their written grammar, perhaps because when they're speaking they don't get paralysed by questions such as how to use a semicolon properly).

Similarly, while some respondents will respond in full sentences (e.g. 'We are tackling this area by buying more cake'), others will respond more briefly (e.g. 'Buying cake'). It can therefore be difficult to present answers to the same question together in a coherent manner.

Technical terms

In both interview transcriptions and survey responses, you'll encounter abbreviations, jargon and slang that may need to be explained (you might even need to research them to find out what specific terms mean). You may also find that different people use different terminology to refer to the same thing, meaning that you need to add explanations or make changes to harmonize the output.

How to edit interview and survey responses

Here are five aspects to consider when you need to make interview and survey responses clear for publication.

1. Establishing a consistent approach

Spelling and style basics

First off, establish which spellings and other stylistic basics (e.g. words or numerals for numbers) you're going to use.

People don't use specific spellings when they speak, so it's usually fine to use the spelling style in the rest of your report (e.g. UK or US English) for interview transcriptions. For survey responses, you'll need to make a judgement call: is the spelling material to the content of the responses? It's usually not, so you will probably want to standardize the spelling and style to match the rest of your report.

General approach: how much will you change?

Next, establish the general approach you'll follow while editing the interview and survey responses.

At one extreme are linguistics transcriptions (usually found in academic writing), where every tiny vocalization and pause is recorded in meticulous detail. At the other end of the scale, you might have the respondents' permission to rephrase their words silently (i.e. without the changes being visible to the reader) to make the words read smoothly.

In most contexts, the approach will fall somewhere in the middle. For example, in the charity research reports I often edit, the goal is to make the quotations read clearly but without imposing perfect grammar. Filler words (see above) can be deleted silently, but any more substantial changes must be visible to the reader, to ensure transparency in the reporting and editing process.

2. Clarifying interview and survey responses: the basics

Your primary weapons when editing interview and survey responses are ellipses and square brackets.

Ellipses

An ellipsis is three dots in a row, like this:

...

You use it when you want to show that text has been omitted. For example, a participant might say this:

She well she likes cake.

and you might change it to this:

She ... likes cake.

Note that it's almost never necessary to use an ellipsis to signal omission at the start or end of a sentence: readers will understand that a quotation may be an extract from a longer piece of speech or text.

(Different editorial style guides have different rules on whether to include spaces around ellipses. I've chosen to use spaces both sides in this post. If you're required to follow a specific style guide, follow its advice. If not, be consistent.)

Square brackets for clarification

Square brackets are used to show when a quotation has been added to or changed. When you add text, simply put the clarifying word in square brackets. For example, if someone said:

I like that coffee cake it's very gooey.

you might change it to:

I like that coffee cake [because] it's very gooey.

You can also use square brackets to change part of a word. For example, if a survey respondent typed 'cake' but their surrounding grammar and the context clearly showed that they meant 'cakes', you could correct this as follows: 'cake[s]'.

Similarly, you can use square brackets to change the tense of a word to make a quotation fit into your sentence. For example, let's say a survey participant wrote:

I like baking every Sunday.

You might want to put this in a sentence that describes what this respondent does every Sunday. For example:

One respondent reported that they 'bak[ed] every Sunday'.

Square brackets for uppercase and lowercase letters

Sometimes people use square brackets to change the case (i.e. uppercase or lowercase) of a word at the start of a sentence to make it fit the context. For example, a respondent might write:

I liked the soup and another thing is that the bread is fantastic.

Let's say you want to start the quotation in the middle of the sentence. You might be tempted to do this:

One respondent said: '[A]nother thing is that the bread is fantastic.'

But this usually isn't necessary. Unless your publication requires an unusually high level of transparency about changes to quotations, you can simply do this:

One respondent said: 'Another thing is that the bread is fantastic.'

Changing punctuation

You can usually be fairly free about changing punctuation in interview and focus group transcriptions, because people don't speak punctuation. Whoever transcribed the interview or focus group will have inserted punctuation based on their judgement, which is subjective.

In survey responses, it's often fine to make punctuation changes too. However, be very careful as changing a seemingly innocuous item of punctuation can sometimes change the whole meaning of a sentence. For example, this sentence would make sense whether or not there was a comma after 'housing':

We talked about housing supply and safety.

If in doubt, use square brackets to show your change. For example, if you were reasonably certain this respondent meant to refer to three separate things, you could add a square-bracketed comma like this:

We talked about housing[,] supply and safety.

3. Clarifying interview and survey responses: more complex cases

Should you put ellipses within square brackets?

Some people put ellipses within square brackets, 'like [...] this'. It's not strictly necessary to do this unless your quotations also contain ellipses to signal trailing off – for example:

I think... no actually let's [...] eat all the cake.

But you might still decide to always put ellipses within square brackets if you want to be extra-transparent. Whatever you choose, be consistent.

Using square brackets to combine omissions with clarifications

You can also use square brackets to combine an omission with a clarification. For example, this quotation:

The cakes are where? Oh yes, there.

might be changed to:

The cakes [are] there.

What we've done here is to omit inessential text and add 'are' to make the text read smoothly.

Clarifying confusing text

Sometimes, you'll need to make more substantial clarifications. For example, someone might say 'They went to Birmingham' without it being clear who 'they' is. In this case, you have three options:

• Add the clarification after the ambiguous word: 'They [the students] went to Birmingham.'
• Add and signal the clarification after the ambiguous word: 'They [i.e. the students] went to Birmingham.'
• Substitute the clarification for the ambiguous word: '[The students] went to Birmingham.'

None of these is either correct or incorrect. You will need to pick whichever feels right for the level of transparency your publication requires.

Preserving anonymity

Finally, square brackets are your saviour when you need to keep an interview or survey response anonymous or remove identifying details. Consider this example:

The problems started when Sarah joined the team.

Poor Sarah! Depending on the context, it might be unfair, irrelevant or inappropriate to point the finger at her in this way. You can fix this kind of thing using square brackets:

The problems started when [the new manager] joined the team.

4. Dealing with ambiguous responses

Sometimes, it can be hard to understand what interviewees and survey respondents meant. This can make it difficult to edit the text appropriately.

In such cases, you have five options:

• Omit the ambiguous text: if it's not especially important or you have a better quotation from elsewhere, you could simply drop the tricky text.
• Clarify the ambiguous text: if you have access to the original recording (in the case of an interview transcription) or can even talk to the speaker or respondent, you might be able to clarify what was meant (potentially without square brackets, if you get permission to do so from the speaker/respondent and if making a 'silent' change is appropriate for your publication). Alternatively, if you don't have access to the original source, you can make your best guess and either implement the change using square brackets or perhaps insert a footnote explaining your interpretation.
• Clarify the ambiguous text with a question mark: if you're pretty sure what the person meant but not certain, you could do something like this: 'That filling [strawberry jam?] is the best'.
• Include the ambiguous text unchanged with a caveat: you can include a note either attached to the tricky text or covering the whole publication, saying something like 'Quotations are presented verbatim, including any ambiguities, for maximum transparency.'
• Include the ambiguous text unchanged without a caveat: if your readers will understand and expect quotations to be ambiguous, you might not need to include a caveat at all.

5. Dealing with offensive or potentially harmful responses

Once again, there is no single correct way to deal with offensive or potentially harmful text in interview and survey responses – if indeed you want to 'deal with it' at all. Sometimes the motivation for the problematic text is part of the very reason for the interview or survey, in which case removing it would not serve the reader or the purpose of the research.

If there is swearing in the text, this is fairly straightforward to address. You can do any of the following:

• Keep it, if suitable for the readership.
• Replace specific letters with asterisks (e.g. 'that cake is sh*t').
• Replace the whole word using square brackets (e.g. 'that cake is [expletive]').

Sometimes you can omit the word and use an ellipsis (see above), although that wouldn't work in the examples just above. An example of where it would work is 'that ... cake tastes really bad'.

Deciding on the approach to take – with swearing and any other potentially harmful content – requires you to gauge your readership and how they will use your publication. This question gets to the heart of the whole research planning and writing process, and strictly speaking is beyond the scope of this article. However, once again, you'll need to strike a balance between two needs:

• The need to comprehensively provide whatever information prompted your interviews or survey to be commissioned.
• The need to ensure anybody affected by the topic encounters the information in a way that is sensitive to their circumstances.

As I say, this is a very broad question and it goes beyond the nitty-gritty of editing. However, you may still find the options in points 1–4 helpful.

Editing interview and survey responses in context

The above examples cover some of the essentials that you can follow if you need to edit interview and survey responses. But context is everything, and there are many potential nuances to bear in mind.

For example, I've referred above to making text read 'smoothly', but what does that mean exactly? In the context of English (the language I edit in), it usually means the Standard English of a majority English-speaking country (e.g. the UK or the USA). However, often it will be desirable (or indeed essential) to preserve non-standard Englishes (i.e. dialects, or variants of English that are standard in other countries). Where this is relevant, the writing and editing team will need to develop and agree a policy.

Another issue is when clarifications cluster so that they actually, ironically, lead to less clarity. For example, no reader is going to appreciate something like this, however accurately it respects the original speech and however faithful it is to your editing approach:

[W]e don't [...] [really?] ... ****ing know... but... he [i.e. Steve] might.

In such cases, you'll need to make careful decisions about what to keep – or whether to change your whole approach.

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Interview and survey responses are rich sources of information for research, reports and studies. They can bring an issue alive and provide human context for statistics. Using the techniques above, you can ensure they are clear and incorporated in a way that is sensitive to the needs of your readers, while retaining the transparency that will maintain those readers' trust.

I love it when I'm asked to edit interview and survey responses as part of my work for charities or businesses. Check out my editing services if you've conducted some research and would like support tidying it up for publication.