Interviewing in Community Oral History

Mary Kay Quinlan, Nancy MacKay, Barbara W Sommer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315426150
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: History

The interview is the anchor of an oral history project. The fourth book in the five-volume Community Oral History Toolkit guides the interviewer through all the steps from interview preparation through follow-up. It includes guidance on selecting interviewees, training interviewers, using recording equipment, and ethical issues concerning the interviewer-interviewee relationship. Packed with instructive case studies, Volume 4 offers concrete practical examples and advice for issues such as pre-interview research, developing interview questions and points for guiding discussion, ideal interview settings and conditions, strategies for stimulating interviewees' memories, acceptable communication techniques and behavior throughout the interview process, and rounding out interview documentation with supplementary materials and contextual information.

Chapter 1

What, Exactly, is an Oral History Interview?

BEST PRACTICE NO. 1
Familiarize yourself with the Oral History Association’s guidelines.

BEST PRACTICE NO. 2
Focus on oral history as a process.

Stop! Don’t turn on your recorder.

The interview is the centerpiece of an oral history project, and this volume will help you learn effective interviewing techniques. But you’re not ready to start recording until you’ve satisfactorily answered all of the following questions.

• Have you created a project team and chosen a project director to ride herd on the project?
• Have you decided on a focus for the project?
• Have you named the project?
• Have you identified people in the community who can support and advocate for the project?
• Have you decided on the project scope, including planned programs, publications, or other outcomes?
• Have you figured out the timeline for project completion?
• Have you estimated the number of interviews you’ll complete?
• Have you written a mission statement?
• Have you determined record-keeping procedures?
• Have you figured out a budget?
• Have you determined what recording equipment you’ll use?
• Have you trained project volunteers?

You’ll find details about each of these steps in Volume 2, Planning a Community Oral History Project and Volume 3, Managing a Community Oral History Project. Here’s why checking them off matters. If you launch your oral history project merely with the notion that a particular person or group of people in your community have great stories to tell or important experiences to recount, and you rush to begin recording them, then what? Would you be able to answer the following questions?

• How will you decide which people in the community to interview?
• What questions will you ask after the interviewee finishes reciting her rehearsed tale?
• What will you do with the interviews after you have them?
• Will you have the legal authority to use the copyrighted interviews?
• Did you even know the interviewee had a copyright to his words?
• Will anyone else be able to hear your interviews?
• Will you transcribe them so others can read them?
• If so, who will do that? The interviewer? Someone else?

Once you’ve figured out answers to these and other questions by following the steps outlined in the Planning (2) and Management (3) volumes of the Community Oral History Toolkit, you’ll be on your way to laying the groundwork for solid oral history interviews. And if you follow the steps in Volume 5, After the Interview in Community Oral History, your interviews will stand the test of time.

So let’s get started. Oral history projects can document the history of a community or neighborhood, including the stuff of everyday life. They can collect memories of specific external events, whether natural or manmade disasters or notable landmark occasions in a community’s life. Or they can focus on documenting the history of community institutions like churches, cultural centers, civic organizations, advocacy groups, or businesses. This volume of the Community Oral History Toolkit is based on the premise that you already have completed a thorough plan for your oral history project, whatever its focus, and that you have a management structure of some kind—ideally a handful of dedicated leaders with clear duties assigned and processes in place. Now, based on that plan, we’ll take a look at what you need to do before an oral history interview, during the interview, and immediately after the interview, regardless of any plans your group may have to create special public programming based on the content of the interviews that you conduct.

Here is an outline of the activities in each phase of the interviewing process that will be discussed in detail in the rest of this volume.

What Project Teams Need to Do

Before the interview

• ✓ Develop background research materials for interviewers.
• ✓ Create a timeline, as appropriate, for the project’s focus.
• ✓ Identify potential interviewees and contact them about the project.
• ✓ Recruit and train interviewers.
• ✓ Match interviewers with interviewees.

What Interviewers Need to Do

Before the interview

• ✓ Become familiar with the project and its goals.
• ✓ Get training so you can use the equipment and learn interviewing techniques.
• ✓ Do general background research about the project’s topic and specific research about your interviewee.
• ✓ Prepare an outline of topics to pursue in the interview.
• ✓ Use appropriate recordkeeping forms developed for your project to document information about your interviewee and the interview process and to secure the interviewee’s consent.
• ✓ Schedule the interview.
• ✓ Arrive on time and bring everything you need.
• ✓ Arrange the interview setting to achieve the best possible audio or video quality.

During the interview

• ✓ Make sure the interviewee is comfortable.
• ✓ Check your equipment to be sure it’s working properly.
• ✓ Record a standard introduction.
• ✓ Use the topic outline to guide questions.
• ✓ Ask follow-up questions for details and context.
• ✓ Use appropriate oral history interviewing techniques.

After the interview

• ✓ Sign the interview Legal Release Agreement.
• ✓ Photograph the interviewee.
• ✓ Thank the interviewee.
• ✓ Write a summary of the interview.
• ✓ Complete all remaining interview-related tasks as determined by the project team.

So please resist the temptation to turn on your recorder just yet. You have much to accomplish before you’re ready to delve into the interview itself. And this volume will help you with those challenges.

Understanding Oral History Interviews

Shoe salesmen, police officers, supermarket clerks, teachers, doctors, scientists, moms, and oral historians all have at least one thing in common: they all ask questions. But the way they go about asking those questions—and listening to the answers—may be quite different. Some, like the shoe salesman, police officer, supermarket clerk, and doctor, often want to know something very specific: What size do you wear? What color do you like? Did you find everything you need today? Do you know how fast you were driving? Where does it hurt? For the scientist, questions may evolve from a hypothesis she is trying to test. For a teacher, questions may range from the specific—Did you do your homework?—to more general—What were the most important ideas in this chapter? And moms, of course, ask all kinds of questions—long, short, specific, wide-ranging, even unwelcome. Most people, in fact, are probably accustomed to asking and answering all kinds of questions throughout a typical day and taking various kinds of actions based on the answers to the questions they encounter. But to the oral historian, questions take on a uniquely important status, because they shape the oral history interview, giving it structure and focus. In an important sense, the interviewer’s questions are what make each oral history interview unique.

The term “oral history” has acquired a popular, generic meaning referring to almost any circumstance—recorded or not—in which people talk about the past. Such discourse can be interesting, entertaining, tear-jerking, therapeutic, sentimental, and lots of fun. It can even reveal important, previously unshared, information about past times and places. But this Toolkit uses a more specific definition of oral history, aimed at assuring that collecting oral information about the past is accomplished in a systematic way that will yield depth and nuance to our understanding of past times and places and that it will remain available to the community for generations to come.

An oral history interview is grounded in context of time and place.

In this Toolkit, an oral history interview is defined as one that is:

• ■ structured,
• ■ recorded,
• ■ intended to elicit firsthand information,
• ■ based on research that provides context, and
• ■ made available to others.

As the definition suggests, an oral history interview is the co-creation of an interviewer and an interviewee, selected because he or she can recount firsthand information that will be kept permanently and be made publicly available. In other words, the oral history recording and its transcript become raw materials providing information and insights through which historians can understand and interpret the past. Oral histories serve as primary sources in the same way government documents, maps, diaries, letters, speeches, newspapers, photographs, minutes of meetings, and all manner of artifacts shed light on past times and places. But what sets oral history apart from these other kinds of documentary evidence is the ability of oral history interviewers to ask probing follow-up questions that enable an interviewee to go beyond creating lists of facts and figures.

Probing questions enable interviewees to go beyond lists of facts and figures.

Instead, a well planned and executed oral history interview will open windows onto the thoughts and feelings of the players in past times and places and generate reflections not only on what happened, but why it happened and how it affected people’s lives.

An oral history interview is not:

• ■ an equal sharing of experiences and opinions,
• ■ a group discussion,
• ■ an accusatory inquisition,
• ■ a passive recital of reminiscences about the olden days,
• ■ a debate,
• ■ an argument,
• ■ a deposition,
• ■ a lecture, or
• ■ a reading from a diary or other documents about the past.

In its generic sense, the term “oral history” is often associated with popular recording projects like StoryCorps, the traveling road show in which people pay a fee to record a 40-minute interview with a loved one, sometimes using questions StoryCorps suggests. The term also is used to refer to other situations in which people self-select to record their memories at state fairs, museums, public commemorative events or similar occasions at which a recording booth or table is set up to gather brief stories or recollections volunteered by participants.

None of this is oral history, as this Toolkit uses the term. Here’s why. These exercises, though they often collect interesting information, are seldom based on rigorous planning or research about the subject at hand or the particular individual being interviewed, and they almost always lack historical context. For example,

• ■ Just who is this person who came forward to tell his story?
• ■ Was the person in a position to have firsthand information about the events she describes?
• ■ What were the circumstances under which the recording took place?

Perhaps the interviewee’s son just died in Afghanistan. Maybe she was just diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Did the interviewee just discover that the grandfather he despised has left him a big inheritance? Did she just sell to a big developer the family farm she so lovingly recalls? Is the interviewee at the church centennial celebration the congregation’s biggest benefactor?

An oral history interview that will stand the test of time would answer all those questions, providing, in other words, some historical context that would add meaning to the interviewees’ words.

More Than Turning On a Recorder

“Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author's Preface
• Series Introduction
• 1 What, Exactly, is an Oral History Interview?
• 2 Understanding the Ethics of Oral History Interviews
• 3 Before the Interview: What Project Teams Need to Do
• 4 Before the Interview: What Interviewers Need to Do
• 5 During the Interview
• 6 After the Interview
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index
• About the Authors