Industry: The education sector
Company size: 5,715 academic staff
Location: Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
The modern world is changing in front of us. Also in terms of security. Pandemics, financial crises, cyber-attacks, fake news, foreign investment in strategic sectors, and so on. The threats facing Spain and Europe are constantly evolving and diversifying.
To contribute to the debate on rethinking the role of the armed forces in the face of new security challenges, the State Research Agency funded the University of Barcelona to carry out in-depth research, using semi-structured in-depth interviews, opinion data analysis, and Delphi methodology. To this end, more than 50 hours of interviews with political, financial, and military elites were recorded. This research has made it possible to define likely future scenarios and recommendations for them.
Predicting scenarios for the future
The Delphi method is based on structured communication. It was originally developed as a systematic, interactive forecasting method that relies on a panel of experts. Delphi has been widely used for business forecasting and has certain advantages over another structured forecasting approach. The first applications of the Delphi method were in the field of science and technology forecasting. Later the Delphi method was applied in other places, especially those related to public policy issues, such as economic trends, health, and education.
Delphi is based on the principle that forecasts from a structured group of individuals are more accurate than those from unstructured groups. The experts answer questionnaires in two or more rounds. After each round, a facilitator provides an anonymized summary of the experts’ forecasts from the previous round as well as the reasons they provided for their judgments. Thus, experts are encouraged to revise their earlier answers in light of the replies of other members of their panel. It is believed that during this process the range of the answers will decrease and the group will converge towards the “correct” answer. Finally, the process is stopped after a predefined stop criterion, and the mean or median scores of the final rounds determine the results.
Using this method required many hours of interviews. University faced a large volume of interviews. They had to divide them between different researchers and couldn’t analyze them accurately with word detection software like Atlas, so the qualitative research was less efficient.
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Manual transcription from Amberscript
Transcribing a bigger amount of voice recordings can delay any project. In some cases – researchers can’t wait for the transcribed text for too long. That was the case for the University of Barcelona. Before ordering manual transcription from Amberscript, getting voice-to-text transcripts could take up to 6 months, between different researchers.
With Amberscript’s manual transcription service 5-hour interviews can be delivered within 3-4 business days. We offer specialized transcription, which can include jargon or specific vocabulary. This results in 99% accuracy for audible files. We accomplish this through hiring the best language experts and extensive quality checks.
“An excellent service, for a very competitive price-quality ratio.”
Prof Rafa Martínez, Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at University of Barcelona, Director of GRAPA (Group of Research and Analysis on Public Administration), Associate Researcher of CIDOB
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