Modified: 2007-01-31
Oral history is a research method that allows researchers to investigate events, facts, and relationships that happened in the past. To conduct an oral history, researchers personally interview someone about past events or analyze video or audio recordings of such interviews. Oral histories can investigate how individuals reacted to specific historical events. Oral histories rely on participants’ memories of events, and thus, are a form of retrospective research using interview techniques.
Oral History Examples
Survivors of the Holocaust, a major historical event, have been extensively interviewed and many of those interviews are archived. (Archives and archival methods are discussed in the section that follows.) Suedfeld et al. (1997) analyzed 30 video-recorded interviews of five male and five female Holocaust survivors. Data from the interviews were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The interviews included the Ways of Coping Scale (Folkman et al., 1986), and those data constituted the quantitative portion of the study. The interviews were also analyzed qualitatively for memory content differences for pre-Holocaust, early Holocaust, late Holocaust, and post-Holocaust events. All of the survivors were living normal lives when interviewed and saw themselves as successful problem solvers. They all downplayed the role of emotional strategies in their survival.
A less dramatic story is that of the sale of medicinal pharmaceuticals containing opium after the passage of the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 in Great Britain. The Dangerous Drugs Act specified that only pharmacists could dispense opiate drugs such as raw opium, cocaine, morphine, or heroin. Anderson and Berridge (2000) conducted oral histories of 50 retired pharmacists who first began working between 1920 and 1978. Most interviewees stated that the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 had little effect on the dispensing of opium. Especially in rural areas, pharmacists sold prepared products containing opium or the ingredients for home remedies that contained opium. One such preparation was “Infant’s Thunder” that was used to put babies to sleep! The main finding of this oral history study was that the passage the Dangerous Drug Act, as well as later drug–prohibiting regulations, did little to prevent the continuing sale of such drugs.
Participants All interview methods require the presence of a willing interviewee. In focus group interviews, a group of interviewees is used. In oral history interviews, the interviewees may be present or they may have been previously recorded.
Apparatus Recording interviews is a common and useful practice. Recording allows researchers to analyze the data multiple times. In interviews about sensitive issues, audio recording is preferable to video recording because interviewees feel less self–conscious.
Procedure Establishing rapport with interviewees is essential for the success of any of these techniques. In both of the focus group interviews described above, the researchers successfully established rapport by having the focus group conducted by a youthful female researcher (Jackson & Cram, 2003) or fellow students (Fallis & Opotow, 2003). Another important procedural issue to decide is what kind of interview to conduct—structured or unstructured. Nearly all interviews are transcribed after they are recorded and the transcripts become the raw material for later analyses.
Results Many interviews are analyzed qualitatively, which require that researchers read the transcripts several times. From these readings, commonalities and themes emerge. Researchers then summarize the commonalities and themes as results. When interviews are analyzed quantitatively, scores are derived either from coded observations or from the answers to specific questions. Those scores are then treated as typical quantitative data.
Ethics Obtaining truly informed consent is an important ethical issue when using interview techniques. Interviewees must know beforehand that the conversations with researchers are for research. Interviewing people without first explaining the purpose, telling them they will be recorded, revealing all of the other requirements of informed consent, and obtaining their permission is unethical.
Our last category of qualitative research is archival research. We begin with a historical example from the field of public health.