For my master’s thesis research on climate policy, I did a series of interviews, which I recorded and then transcribed. Transcribing the interviews took about 4-5 hours per hour of recording, which is about the average that I’ve seen written about. Transcribing a lot of interviews can be tough, as others have blogged about.
However, I came up with a streamlined process that made it a bit easier, and I thought might be useful to share. I had recorded my interviews with a digital recorder borrowed from my university library, so I did all my transcription work on my laptop. I set it up so that I could switch between controlling the audio and my word processor with keyboard shortcuts, and after a few hours I was switching back and forth pretty quickly. You can read a page about how I set it up in the Research section of the site here.