Oral History

The Interview and its Analysis

At the heart of oral history is interviewing, a method of data collection that is central to social science practice but equally familiar to historians researching contemporary and 20th century history. For oral historians, the spoken immediacy of the interview, its social relations, and its inevitably interrogative nature are its defining characteristics, yet oral history remains a broad church. Depending on the disciplinary base of the oral historian and on the chosen topic, approaches to finding interviewees and interviewing may vary.

In an early and formative study, Paul Thompson (2000, pp. 145ff) used a quota sample, taking a sociological approach to find subjects from populations that could not be subjected to randomized selection. When oral historians draw on late-life memories, they are working with survivors. In the Thompson case, a quota sample was used to fill predetermined categories with interview subjects, matching occupational groups identified in the 1911 U.K. census. Such an approach is favored when the focus is general social trends over time, for example, explorations of family relationships, gender, migration, employment, or political generations.

In such studies, interviews tend to be based on standardized areas for questioning, with topic areas identified, most frequently within a life history perspective. Because the aim is to draw out comparable sources of evidence, to find regularities and patterns in what is presented, interviews tend to follow a closely prescribed form. Studies of this type are likely to be based on sample sizes nearer 100.

In contrast, studies that seek to explore particular events, or that draw on the experiences of a highly select group of survivors, or that focus on one individual's story tend to take a rather different approach to finding and interviewing subjects. In such cases, the most usual approaches to finding interviewees are snowball sampling, appealing through the media, and using membership lists, representative bodies, or networks among older people's organizations to advertise for witness accounts.

Where studies draw on only a few accounts, the approach to interviewing may be rather different. For one thing, there may be a return to interview the same person more than once, the aim being to secure a full account and one that will enable free expression of subjective experience on the part of the interviewee. Approaches vary again. For some oral historians, a more psychoanalytic, free-associative interaction has proved to be attractive. Explorations of memories of such events as childhood separation, experiences of segregation on the basis of race and disability, and strikes or conflicts can release powerful evocations, particularly when linked to other sources of evidence, documentary or visual, and when situated and explored in the interview as part of a whole life experience.

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