Research Equipment

[Pam Norton]

Hello all,
   I am preparing to do a research study in a public
school setting looking at African American children
who speak AAVE, the public school assessment process,
and the speech pathologists who conduct them.  It will
be a qualitative study in which I will both be
interviewing speech pathologists about their
assessment practices and observing them assessing
African American children.  I would like to both
videotape and audiotape them.  I plan to use a laptop
to record my own observations at the school sites and
data regarding the interviews.  I would like to get
suggestions about equipment (I also have a desktop, so
any suggestions on that would be welcome too), from
hardware specifications on the laptop, to software
that could be useful for transcribing interviews as
well as language samples of the children.  I'm sure
this is a big topic but any references and/or
experience would be very welcome.

Thank you,

Pam Norton, M..S., CCC-SLP
Joint Doctoral Program in Special Education at
San Francisco State and UC Berkeley