Oral History Methodology

Designed for post-graduate students, this resource provides an overview of oral history methodology and offers specific instructional guidance on doing interviews and fieldwork - especially in post-authoritarian societies, where fieldworkers are more likely to confront interviewees living with painful emotions and memories of traumatic events.

The author, Dr. Sean Field, starts from the assumption that "the person who knows the most about their life stories and their community is not the interviewer/researcher but the interviewee. This argument is a conceptual break with perceiving researchers as 'experts', and rather approaches interviewees as having valuable life stories and localised forms of popular knowledge....A key question becomes what strategies will build respectful and co-operative relationships between communities and researchers?"

From this perspective, Dr. Field offers specific instructional guidance on doing interviews and fieldwork as part of this educational supplement to a series of workshops, held over 3 days, that was originally conducted in Vietnam and the Philippines in 2007 as part of the Sephis [South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development] initiative. In addition to outlining the specific sessions carried out as part of that training programme, this resource focuses on the following topics:

• Introduction
• What Is Oral History?
• Oral History Dialogues and Skills What Makes Life Stories So Significant?
• Planning an Oral History Project
• Selecting Equipment
• Selecting People to Interview
• Preparing for Interviews and Interview Guides
• Setting up Interviews
• Doing Interviews
• Labelling Interviews
• Transcribing Interviews
• Negotiating Emotions
• Interpreting Memories and Life Stories
• Disseminating Oral Histories
• Contributing to Development
• Conclusion
• Suggested Readings