MRKT 600 Week 4 Interview Transcripts Example

Interview Transcripts: Two Adults Describe Choosing a Primary Care Physician Online, With Codes and Emergent Themes

Procedure

Both interviews used the same five open questions: how the participant chose a new primary care physician, where the participant looked for information, what role online reviews played, what kind of review would change the participant's mind, and what the participant would tell a friend choosing a doctor. Before recording, each participant heard a consent statement explaining that the interview would be recorded, used only for a class assignment, and transcribed with names removed. Interview A lasted 7 minutes 40 seconds and Interview B 6 minutes 15 seconds. Both were transcribed verbatim from the recordings, with line numbers added for coding.

Interview A Transcript (Participant A, age 34)

• 1. Interviewer: Can you walk me through how you chose your current primary care doctor?
• 2. Participant A: Sure. So, um, we moved here about a year ago, and my insurance has a lot of doctors in network, so the list was kind of useless, it was like eighty names. So I just started looking them up on the booking app and on Google.
• 3. Interviewer: What did you look at first?
• 4. Participant A: The stars, honestly, just to cut the list down. Anybody under like four, four and a half, I skipped. But then I'd open the ones that were left and read, I mean, I read everything. All the comments.
• 5. Interviewer: What were you looking for in the comments?
• 6. Participant A: Whether they actually listen. That's my big thing. I had a doctor before who'd walk in looking at the screen and walk out. So if somebody wrote, like, "she took time to explain my results," that mattered a lot. And then the front desk stuff, because you can have a great doctor and if you can never get through on the phone, what's the point.
• 7. Interviewer: Did any review change your mind about a doctor?
• 8. Participant A: Yeah, there was one, he had like four point eight, which is great, but there were three comments in a row about the office losing referrals. Like, specific stuff. "I called four times and nobody sent my referral." And I thought, okay, that's not one angry person, that's a pattern. So I skipped him.
• 9. Interviewer: How did you weigh those three comments against the high rating?
• 10. Participant A: The comments won. The rating is, I don't know, everybody's ratings are high. The comments are where you find out what it's actually like. If it's vague, like "worst doctor ever," I ignore it. If it's specific, I believe it.
• 11. Interviewer: What would you tell a friend who's choosing a doctor?
• 12. Participant A: Read the bad ones. Don't just look at the number. And look at the dates, because if all the bad stuff is from three years ago, maybe they fixed it.

Codes for Interview A

Interview B Transcript (Participant B, age 61)

• 1. Interviewer: Can you walk me through how you chose your current primary care doctor?
• 2. Participant B: Well, my old doctor retired, which, that was hard, I'd seen him twenty years. So I asked my neighbor first, she's a nurse, and she gave me two names. Then I looked them both up on the hospital's website.
• 3. Interviewer: What did you look at on the website?
• 4. Participant B: The stars and, you know, where they went to school, and whether the office was close. Both of them had good stars, four and a half, something like that.
• 5. Interviewer: Did you read the comments?
• 6. Participant B: A few. Not many. Honestly I don't trust them that much. People only write when they're mad, or the office tells them to write something nice. I'd rather hear from somebody I know.
• 7. Interviewer: Did anything you read change your mind?
• 8. Participant B: Not really. One of them, there were some comments that she was rushed, but my neighbor said she's very good, so I went with her. And she is good. She's a little quick, that part's true.
• 9. Interviewer: What kind of review would make you choose a different doctor?
• 10. Participant B: If a lot of people said the same thing, I guess, like if many people said she made mistakes. But a couple of people saying she's rushed, that's every doctor now.
• 11. Interviewer: What would you tell a friend who's choosing a doctor?
• 12. Participant B: Ask somebody you trust first. Then use the website to check the basics, insurance and location and that the stars aren't terrible.

Codes for Interview B

Emergent Themes

Grouping the codes followed the phased thematic analysis of Braun and Clarke (2006): reading both transcripts several times, labeling passages, clustering the labels, testing each cluster against both interviews and only then giving it a name. Creswell (2014) describes qualitative analysis as moving from specific data to broader categories while staying close to participants' words, and the themes below keep the participants' own language where possible.

Theme 1: Stars screen, comments decide, for some. Both participants used star ratings as a first filter, but only Participant A let comments decide the choice. This mirrors research showing that review text, not only ratings, predicts physician choice, while suggesting that the effect depends on the reader.

Theme 2: Specific and repeated complaints carry weight. Participant A believed specific, repeated complaints and discounted vague ones, and Participant B said only widespread serious complaints would matter. Both judged credibility by detail and frequency, consistent with experimental findings that factual negative reviews are especially persuasive.

Theme 3: Access and staff count as much as the physician. Comments about phones, referrals and front desk staff influenced Participant A as much as comments about the physician, a service dimension that a star average blends with clinical care.

Theme 4: Trusted people outweigh strangers. Participant B began with a neighbor's recommendation and used reviews only to check for problems, which suggests that for some patients reviews confirm rather than drive choices.

Two items follow for the survey in Module/Week 7: whether respondents began with a personal recommendation, and how they would choose between a high-rated physician with specific negative comments and a slightly lower-rated physician without them. The two interviews suggest that the question is not only how patients weigh stars and comments, but which patients read the comments at all. Alreck and Settle (2004) note that exploratory interviews help researchers write survey questions in respondents' own terms, and these themes will shape the wording of those items.

References

Alreck, P. L., & Settle, R. B. (2004). The survey research handbook (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77-101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa

Creswell, J. W. (2014). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (4th ed.). SAGE Publications.