Everyone who has worked with qualitative interview data has run into problems with transcription error, even if they do the transcribing themselves. A thoughtful, accurate, reliable, multilingual transcriptionist with a quick turnaround time is worth her or his weight in gold. In this article, the authors examine some transcription circumstances that seem to bring about their own consistent set of problems. Based on their experiences, the authors examine the following issues: use of voice recognition systems; notation choices; processing and active listening versus touch typing; transcriptionist effect; emotionally loaded audiotaped material; class and/or cultural differences among interviewee, interviewer, and transcriptionist; and some errors that arise when working in a second language. The authors offer suggestions for working with transcriptionists as part of the qualitative research team.

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Evaluating multiple-member partnerships is always a challenging task. This article is based on our experiences using a participatory approach to evaluating a community-based health promotion research project. “Mujer Sana, Comunidad Sana—Healthy Women, Healthy Communities” was partnership-based, multi-sector, multicultural, and participatory. We describe our experiences working with participatory methods to evaluate the partnership per se. Three evaluation frameworks were applied sequentially by the authors and provided insight into the functioning of the partnership in a complex and changing environment. Our experiences suggest that, through the process of participatory evaluation, the partnership itself also changed in ways that were not fully captured at the time of the original project evaluation. We reflect on the process with questions that might help other groups to consider ways to evaluate partnerships in community-based, participatory health research projects with minority and majority community partners.

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