Is Near-Verbatim Note-taking Possible?
The Washington state report said that interviewers could learn to take notes that would approach the completeness of tape recording. It mentioned that one of its interviews had been taken by a full-time child interviewer who, in the opinion of the authors, had the skill. The Washington state study, though, did not involve any interviews which were documented by both taping and written notes. Rather, the study compared tapes of interviews in one part of the state with notes of contemporaneous interviews in a different part of the state. The Israeli-American study, by contrast, used only interviews which had been documented by both audio taping and written notes. All of its interviewers were youth investigators with long experience taking legally-mandated “verbatim” notes. All knew the interviews in the study were being taped, so sloppiness in note-taking could be discovered. Even under these conditions, notes did not approach the completeness of tape recording. From this the Israeli-Ame
