scholarly journals Comparing acoustic analyses of speech data collected remotely

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cong Zhang ◽  
Kathleen Jepson ◽  
Georg Lohfink ◽  
Amalia Arvaniti

Face-to-face speech data collection has been next to impossible globally due to COVID-19 restrictions. To address this problem, simultaneous recordings of three repetitions of the cardinal vowels were made using a Zoom H6 Handy Recorder with external microphone (henceforth H6) and compared with two alternatives accessible to potential participants at home: the Zoom meeting application (henceforth Zoom) and two lossless mobile phone applications (Awesome Voice Recorder, and Recorder; henceforth Phone). F0 was tracked accurately by all devices; however, for formant analysis (F1, F2, F3) Phone performed better than Zoom, i.e. more similarly to H6. Zoom recordings also exhibited unexpected drops in intensity. The results suggest that lossless format phone recordings present a viable option for at least some phonetic studies.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cong Zhang ◽  
Kathleen Jepson ◽  
Georg Lohfink ◽  
Amalia Arvaniti

Face-to-face speech data collection has been next to impossible globally due to COVID-19 restrictions. To address this problem, simultaneous recordings of three repetitions of the cardinal vowels were made using a Zoom H6 Handy Recorder with external microphone (henceforth H6) and compared with two alternatives accessible to potential participants at home: the Zoom meeting application (henceforth Zoom) and two lossless mobile phone applications (Awesome Voice Recorder, and Recorder; henceforth Phone). F0 was tracked accurately by all devices; however, for formant analysis (F1, F2, F3) Phone performed better than Zoom, i.e. more similarly to H6. Zoom recordings also exhibited unexpected drops in intensity. The results suggest that lossless format phone recordings present a viable option for at least some phonetic studies.


Author(s):  
Tracy Spencer ◽  
Linnea Rademaker ◽  
Peter Williams ◽  
Cynthia Loubier

The authors discuss the use of online, asynchronous data collection in qualitative research. Online interviews can be a valuable way to increase access to marginalized participants, including those with time, distance, or privacy issues that prevent them from participating in face-to-face interviews. The resulting greater participant pool can increase the rigor and validity of research outcomes. The authors also address issues with conducting in-depth asynchronous interviews such as are needed in phenomenology. Advice from the field is provided for rigorous implementation of this data collection strategy. The authors include extensive excerpts from two studies using online, asynchronous data collection.


2021 ◽  
pp. 105566562110217
Author(s):  
Alexis C. Wood ◽  
C. Alejandra Garcia de Mitchell ◽  
Ruchi Kaushik

Objective: Identify factors contributing to time a family spends in a Multidisciplinary Craniofacial Team Clinic (MDCT) and implement an intervention to reduce this time. Design: Interventional: a restructuring of clinics to serve those patients requiring fewer provider encounters separately. Setting: An American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association-accredited MDCT in an academic children’s hospital. Patients/Participants: One hundred sixty-seven patients with craniofacial diagnoses. Interventions: Time data were tabulated over ∼2 years. Following 9 months of data collection, patients requiring fewer provider encounters were scheduled to a separate clinic serving children with craniosynostosis, and data were collected in the same fashion for another 14 months. Main Outcome Measures: Principal outcome measures included total visit time and proportion of the visit spent without a provider in the room before and after clinic restructuring. Results: The average time spent by family in a clinic session was 161.53 minutes, of which 64.3% was spent without a provider in the room. Prior to clinic restructuring, a greater number of provider encounters was inversely associated with percentage of time spent without a provider ( P < .001). Upon identifying this predictor, scheduling patients who needed fewer provider encounters to a Craniosynostosis Clinic session resulted in reduction in absolute and percentage of time spent without a provider ( P < .001). Conclusions: The number of provider encounters is a significant predictor of the proportion of a clinic visit spent without a provider. Clinic restructuring to remove patient visits that comprise fewer provider encounters resulted in a greater percentage of time spent with a provider in an MDCT.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Amri ◽  
Christina Angelakis ◽  
Dilani Logan

Abstract Objective Through collating observations from various studies and complementing these findings with one author’s study, a detailed overview of the benefits and drawbacks of asynchronous email interviewing is provided. Through this overview, it is evident there is great potential for asynchronous email interviews in the broad field of health, particularly for studies drawing on expertise from participants in academia or professional settings, those across varied geographical settings (i.e. potential for global public health research), and/or in circumstances when face-to-face interactions are not possible (e.g. COVID-19). Results Benefits of asynchronous email interviewing and additional considerations for researchers are discussed around: (i) access transcending geographic location and during restricted face-to-face communications; (ii) feasibility and cost; (iii) sampling and inclusion of diverse participants; (iv) facilitating snowball sampling and increased transparency; (v) data collection with working professionals; (vi) anonymity; (vii) verification of participants; (viii) data quality and enhanced data accuracy; and (ix) overcoming language barriers. Similarly, potential drawbacks of asynchronous email interviews are also discussed with suggested remedies, which centre around: (i) time; (ii) participant verification and confidentiality; (iii) technology and sampling concerns; (iv) data quality and availability; and (v) need for enhanced clarity and precision.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 3320
Author(s):  
Amy R. Villarosa ◽  
Lucie M. Ramjan ◽  
Della Maneze ◽  
Ajesh George

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in many changes, including restrictions on indoor gatherings and visitation to residential aged care facilities, hospitals and certain communities. Coupled with potential restrictions imposed by health services and academic institutions, these changes may significantly impact the conduct of population health research. However, the continuance of population health research is beneficial for the provision of health services and sometimes imperative. This paper discusses the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on the conduct of population health research. This discussion unveils important ethical considerations, as well as potential impacts on recruitment methods, face-to-face data collection, data quality and validity. In addition, this paper explores potential recruitment and data collection methods that could replace face-to-face methods. The discussion is accompanied by reflections on the challenges experienced by the authors in their own research at an oral health service during the COVID-19 pandemic and alternative methods that were utilised in place of face-to-face methods. This paper concludes that, although COVID-19 presents challenges to the conduct of population health research, there is a range of alternative methods to face-to-face recruitment and data collection. These alternative methods should be considered in light of project aims to ensure data quality is not compromised.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
James Trujillo ◽  
Asli Özyürek ◽  
Judith Holler ◽  
Linda Drijvers

AbstractIn everyday conversation, we are often challenged with communicating in non-ideal settings, such as in noise. Increased speech intensity and larger mouth movements are used to overcome noise in constrained settings (the Lombard effect). How we adapt to noise in face-to-face interaction, the natural environment of human language use, where manual gestures are ubiquitous, is currently unknown. We asked Dutch adults to wear headphones with varying levels of multi-talker babble while attempting to communicate action verbs to one another. Using quantitative motion capture and acoustic analyses, we found that (1) noise is associated with increased speech intensity and enhanced gesture kinematics and mouth movements, and (2) acoustic modulation only occurs when gestures are not present, while kinematic modulation occurs regardless of co-occurring speech. Thus, in face-to-face encounters the Lombard effect is not constrained to speech but is a multimodal phenomenon where the visual channel carries most of the communicative burden.


2020 ◽  
pp. 026666692096984
Author(s):  
Wesley Shu ◽  
Songquan Pang ◽  
Minder Chen

Knowledge management (KM) is a complicated process that involves socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization and requires close collaboration among the people involved. Although Nonaka proposed the SECI (Socialization, Externalization, Combination, Internalization) model and the concept of Ba, which provides a process-oriented view of knowledge creation and transfer, practicing it is rather ad hoc. COVID-19 has provided a chance for practitioners to find a new method for KM. In this study, we adapted a group problem-solving system called TeamSpirit and structured it as a Ba for the SECI model. We then compared TeamSpirit with two other implementations of Ba, email and face-to-face communication, to evaluate their effects on knowledge externalization, knowledge combination, and knowledge internalization. Then, we evaluated whether these knowledge-conversion processes could improve knowledge acquisition and intention to share knowledge. A 3 × 2 mixed factorial design experiment was conducted. The results show that (a) TeamSpirit was better than the others, and face-to-face was better than email for each of the three knowledge conversion processes (externalization, combination, and internalization) and (b) the better the team’s knowledge conversion process lead, the stronger its knowledge acquisition and knowledge-sharing intention.


Addiction ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 99 (7) ◽  
pp. 885-896 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theresa E. Perlis ◽  
Don C. Des Jarlais ◽  
Samuel R. Friedman ◽  
Kamyar Arasteh ◽  
Charles F. Turner

2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Cleary ◽  
Nigel Balmer

Maintaining participant engagement in longitudinal surveys has been a key focus of survey research, and has implications for the quality of response and cost of administration. This paper presents new research measuring the impact of the design of between-wave keeping-in-touch mailings on response to the mailing and subsequent wave of a longitudinal survey. Three design attributes of the mailings were randomly implemented: the form of response request (whether respondents were asked to respond only if their address had changed, or in all cases to confirm or update their address); the newsletter included with the mailing (contrasting a newsletter with content tailored to respondent characteristics with a general newsletter and no newsletter); and the outgoing postage used (stamped or franked). The experiments were fielded on a new longitudinal study, the English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Panel Survey (CSJPS), and took place between waves one and two. Fieldwork for both waves was conducted by Ipsos MORI face-to-face interviewers. Our main finding was that the tailored newsletter was associated with a significant increase in the wave-two response rate. However, in relation to response to the request, the tailored newsletter, or sending no newsletter at all, were equally effective at inducing response, and significantly better than the general newsletter. We also found that, in relation to the form of request, the ‘change of address’ request was as effective as the more costly ‘confirmation’ request. Findings are discussed with reference to the design of keeping-in-touch mailings for longitudinal surveys.


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