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Oral History Interviews

Advantages and Challenges of Employing Oral History Interviewing as Part of a Research Project

Mike Conway

Oral history is an empowering research method in media studies. Through oral history, researchers record and preserve the thoughts and remembrances of people and groups who may previously have had little chance to have their voices heard. “Human beings individually as well as collectively make the decisions that change history,” according to Valerie Yow (2008, p. 186): “We want to know why they made these decisions, how they made them, and even how the got to that point.” Oral history is empowering for researchers because the method demands a personal interaction with the subject, and a realization that the interview is a collaborative process involving both the interviewer and interviewee.

Oral history as a research method has its roots in the field of history as an additional primary source to better understand historical events. But scholars in many other disciplines, as well as the general public, recognized the potential of oral history and have adapted and adopted it for use across a wide variety of projects. While oral history as a historical method is still used primarily to provide a more inclusive and accurate record of the past, in other academic fields the process of remembering, including what people forget or how they reconstruct the past, has become just as important as the historical information itself.

This chapter first examines the history of oral history as a research method in the twentieth century, starting as an added element in historical research to becoming the central component in memory studies. It then takes a look at the latest in memory research, to develop a better understanding of how our brains actually work to code and retrieve events. The following section focuses on preparing for oral history interviews, from working with your university's human subjects committee, pre-interview research, finding subjects, to deciding between audio and video interviews. The chapter then considers the logistics of the interview itself, including location, length, and tips on how best to tap into those important memories. Finally, it addresses how the interviews are used in academic research, focusing on analytic strategies, transcriptions, legal release forms, and repositories for your original interviews.

Recovering and Interpreting the Past

Chester Burger sat up on his couch on Manhattan's Upper West Side, looking past the small video camera, and summoned half-century-old memories of the debates on adapting journalism for the new medium of television. “How should you present news with a person? We didn't know,” remembered the 82-year-old New York native about his work on early Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) television newscasts. “I remember the one category, if we may call it that, we didn't try was a female. We never even thought about having a female face or voice in that culture and in that period. It was never even in our minds” (Burger, 2003).

One week later, in Guilford, Connecticut, 86-year-old Robert Bendick talked about those same discussions on television news at CBS. “We were trying to find out what makes a good commentator or news reporter and we tried various people and some were not very . . . didn't have charisma, didn't have the delivery that we needed . . . so it was auditioning time on the air, which is about what it amounted to” (Bendick, 2003). That same year, close to 4,000 miles away, 91-year-old Henry Cassirer sat on his patio in Annecy-le-Vieux, France, and explained his role in those mid-1940s CBS meetings. “You see we had the great advantage of not having a public,” remembered Cassirer. “You could try out anything. That gave us great freedom of experimentation” (Cassirer, 2003).

All three memories, separately and collectively, combined with other historical material, provide important insight into the development of one of the most powerful positions in journalism, the television newscaster. The newscasts themselves predate kinescopes and videotape, so they cannot be viewed today. There is little written documentation on the origins of the position later known as news anchor. So, without these recorded memories collected more than 50 years after the event, we would have a limited understanding of what happened. More importantly, less then a decade after these interviews were recorded, all three men had passed away.

These three men all had successful media careers and could not easily be considered marginalized or silenced voices over their lifetimes. But in the particular area of early television news, their important contributions had been ignored until their oral histories were recorded, analyzed, and published (Conway, 2009a). One of the strengths of oral history is its versatility as a research method. You can explore the breadth of a person's life or you can focus on key events or contributions. Oral history allows you to tailor the process to the research questions at hand.

Oral history can be divided into two categories: oral tradition and personal reminiscences. Oral tradition involves the passing along of information from generation to generation through stories and verse. Prior to the written word, people relied on oral traditions to keep a record of their past. The second category, personal reminiscences, includes the remembering of events in a person's past, usually prompted by questions from an interviewer. For the purposes of this chapter, we will be focusing primarily on the personal reminiscences area of oral history, which we will call the oral history interview.

The Oral History Association (2009) defines the term as referring “both to a method of recording and preserving oral testimony and to the product of that process.” The key elements in oral history include a person interviewing someone about his or her personal experiences, with the interview preserved on audio or video. Oral history is known by several names and is popular in several academic disciplines, as well as with the general public. The process is also called life history, personal narrative, oral biography, memoir, testament, and a self-report.

Oral history is practiced not only in historical and media research, but also in anthropology, literary studies, sociology, linguistics, folklore, psychology, and cultural studies. Because oral history has been embraced across such a wide range of disciplines, both academic and public, specific definitions and details on the purpose and approach can vary. Some scholars use the terms “oral history” and “in-depth interviewing” interchangeably, while others consider oral history a more “holistic” approach (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2006, p. 153). In-depth interviewing often includes a group of people who are asked a fairly structured set of questions, while oral history focuses on the individual, with a more organic approach to finding out about the person's life or a specific period of time.

History of Oral History

Oral history emerged as a valuable research method in the mid-twentieth century as scholars began to push beyond traditional historical research and its emphasis on printed documents as the most important sources. Traditional historical research tended to focus on the people in power, those who left behind a paper trail. Some historians continued to study elites, using oral history to fill in the gaps of information not provided in the printed sources. Other scholars, especially in Europe, began to use oral history to focus on the working class and other groups that might be invisible or marginalized in print sources (Ritchie, 2011).

This approach to historical research became known as social history, a “bottom-up” approach to remembering the past. One of the inspirations in this area came from a Depression era program in the United States. Members of the Federal Writers' Project, led by folklorist John Lomax, tracked down more than 2,300 former slaves in 17 states and recorded their memories. The project, Born in Slavery, became one of the most important resources for understanding everyday life in bondage (Blakey, 2005; Library of Congress, 2001).

Columbia University initiated the first academic oral history project when it opened the Oral History Research Office in 1948. Allan Nevins, a former journalist trained in interviewing people, ran the Columbia effort and took on high-profile projects to interview people for their role in historic events. The social history movement led to the creation of the History Workshop at Ruskin College in Great Britain in 1966. That same year, the Oral History Association (OHA) was formed.

As the technology improved for recording audio, and the interest in social history and critical theory expanded, oral history interviewing moved out of the academy and into the community. State and local historical societies began oral history projects to save the memories of people in their geographic area. Organizations started recording interviews with their long-time members to preserve their stories. Teachers initiated oral history projects for their students. The popular Foxfire series of magazines and books stemmed from high school teacher Eliot Wigginton and his Rabun County, Georgia, students conducting oral histories on life in the Southern Appalachian Mountain area (Perks & Thomson, 2009; Ritchie, 2011).

The popularity of oral history also sparked a backlash from traditional historians. If just anybody could do these interviews, what was their value? If hundreds and thousands of these recordings sit in archives across the world with few, if anyone, listening and analyzing them, how does that advance our understanding of the past? The OHA began to craft a set of guidelines and best practices, a process that continues to this day. While oral history's popularity stemmed partly from its low barrier to entry – access to an audio recorder and the ability to ask people questions – oral history as scholarship demanded a high level of research and understanding of the strengths and weaknesses as a research method.

While historians debated the strengths and weaknesses of oral history, other disciplines began to incorporate the method into their research. Interviewing had long been a part of ethnographic research, so oral history had common ground in that area. Critical theory emerged in literary studies, to study and give voice to under-represented groups. In many sections of society and cultures, women had been denied access to the power structure, so their histories often included few printed documents. Nondominant and marginalized groups may not leave a paper trail, thus oral history became a valuable way to research gender, class, and ethnicity.

Many historians continue to take an epistemological approach, using oral histories to provide a more accurate and textured look at the past. But for other scholars, in an area loosely defined as memory studies, the accuracy of the information is less important than the memory and the process of remembering. For Alessandro Portelli (2009), “[o]ral sources tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did” (p. 36). Memory studies include research on shared (not individual) memories, which builds on the work of Maurice Halbwachs (1992), who coined the term “collective memory.” For collective and public memory scholar Carolyn Kitch (2012, p. 7), “[t]he concept of memory has become a popular lens through which to see how the past is understood retrospectively and how social groups use ideas about history in order to make sense of their identity in the present. These processes occur over time, a memory is reshaped again and again.”

Memory

Whether you are utilizing oral history to add to the historical record or to understand how people process the past, it is helpful to know how the brain works before embarking on an oral history project. Researchers from several disciplines are studying memory from a variety of approaches, and we can glean important information from these studies to help us better utilize oral history as a research method.

First of all, we have to throw out the old notion that when an event happens, our brain saves the memory and stores it somewhere so we can bring it back later, like a tape recording. Instead, the brain takes different parts of the sensory experience and puts them in different places. So, depending on what question or stimulus brings back the event, the memory can have different details, contingent on how the brain arranges the recovered information (Whittlesea, 2011).

It is a common assumption that the older we get, the less we remember. This is true, but only to a point. Problems with story recall can begin in people as early as their late forties, but in studies, older people only lost about 10–15% more memory than younger people. In reality, most memory loss happens in the first hour, followed by the next nine hours (Schacter, 2001). If the experience survives the first day, it has a good chance of being saved in the long-term memory. Research shows we have a better memory for either unpleasant or pleasant experiences. Events that are particularly important to us can be recalled in great detail, which Brown and Kulik (2000, p. 51) dubbed “flashbulb memories.” We tend to have stronger memories of events if we have told the story to others over the years or even just gone over it on our mind, processes called overt and covert rehearsal.

Another interesting aspect of memory is that as time goes on, our memories take on a narrative structure. In studies of both a soldier in a Vietnam War battle and people in New York City on September 11, 2001, the eyewitness interviews conducted right after the events were disjointed, heavily detailed, and very graphic. When those same people were interviewed years later, the memories had been turned into a more coherent narrative with fewer details. We use our memory to make sense of our lives (Allison, 2009; Clark, 2011).

Scholars are concerned with both the validity (accuracy about event being remembered) and reliability (degree of change in details and structure as memory is retold) of oral history interviews. Unfortunately, in memory retrieval, people can mix in what happened with what they imagined. They can confuse what they saw on television with what they personally witnessed. Even with very detailed and confident “flashbulb memories,” some of the details can be wrong. Researchers say the police practice of showing witnesses mug shots can be problematic. People may take the mug shot image and place it at the crime scene in their mind and be convinced that the person was there (Buckhout, 2000).

In general, people tend to remember accurately the general outline of the experience, but some of the details may be altered. Ulric Neisser (2000) studied John Dean's testimony during the 1970s Watergate hearings. Dean testified in a manner that put him closer to the events than he really was, when compared to the secret tape recordings. President Richard Nixon's people thought the discrepancies would damage Dean's credibility. But his general message remained fairly consistent and the public seemed to ignore the wrong details and accept his overall memory.

More studies have focused on the reliability of memory than the validity. In general, people's memories tend to be reliable, that is, their versions of long ago events are fairly consistent. But fewer studies have looked at the validity of the memories, that is, how they fit with what we know about the event. Studies also show that people have stronger memories for distinct events or experiences that did not continue through the years. In other words, if someone does the same thing over and over, the first time may stay in the memory because it was new and distinct. But as the same process is repeated over weeks or years, he or she loses the specific details and retains the generalities.

As you might expect, what is happening today, or anytime since the event, colors how people remember the past. A memory is a way of making sense, so people may consciously or unconsciously mold the memory to today's situation.

Overall, research tells us that we need to approach oral history interview information as we would any evidence – with caution and with other research data to either parallel or contradict the interview details. On the positive side, research shows that if events and situations are committed to long-term memory, there is a strong chance they will not be entirely lost. The person may have trouble accessing a memory, but given the right cues the brain can bring it back. This aspect of memory underlines the importance of the questions you ask and other methods you can use to dredge up long ago memories (Charlton, Myers, & Sharpless, 2006, 2008; Neisser & Hyman, 2000; Perks & Thomson, 2009; Ritchie, 2011; Schacter, 2001; Yow, 2005).

Human Subjects Review

One of the more contentious issues in oral history involves institutional review boards (IRBs) and human subjects protections. If you have done any research in a university setting in the United States involving human beings, you already know about IRBs and the paperwork involved. Oral historians have lobbied over the years to have the method excluded from human subjects review, but in most cases in the United States you will have to deal with your university's IRB before you can start your oral history research project.

Institutional review boards have an important role in academic research. They are designed to protect human subjects from harm during research. But the current system has been designed mostly for biomedical studies with little understanding or concern for the differences in other forms of research. Two of the main areas that highlight the differences with oral history are anonymity and record keeping. Regulators want to make sure human subjects stay anonymous and that the data is quickly destroyed after the project is completed. In oral history, the identity of the person being interviewed is often important to the research project and as oral historians we have an obligation to save the interviews and transcripts for future researchers. So the process of getting your project approved may involve helping the IRB staff understand your particular research method and why it may differ from biomedical studies (Schrag, 2010).

Here are a few tips to help you through the IRB process:

• Start early: The process of gaining approval for your project could take weeks, or even months, depending on your IRB.
• Do not conduct any oral history interviews until you have IRB approval. You will not be able to use any data that you collect from human subjects before the approval date of your project by the IRB.
• Find out your university's policy on oral history interviews. A handful of schools have exempted oral history from the IRB process. In most cases you will need to go through an expedited (quicker) or a full (longer) review.
• Keep your project description as broad and inclusive as possible. Once your project is approved, you will have to go through an amendment process if you make any substantive changes to your project.
• Create a list of broad, overall interview questions. IRBs tend to want to see the exact questions you will be asking in the interviews. Gently let the IRB know that these are the type of questions you will be asking in your project but that you have to tailor the specific questions to the person's background and involvement in the project topic.
• Informed consent form: Depending on your IRB's policies, you may be asked to provide the interviewees with an informed consent form. This form spells out the rights and responsibilities of the researcher and the person being interviewed, in most cases giving the person the opportunity to stop participating in the project at any point. The informed consent form is usually separate from the legal release form, which will be discussed later.
• Project length: Pay close attention to the end date on your IRB project approval. After a certain period of time, your project approval will expire, unless you ask for a continuation. If you are given the opportunity, ask for a longer period of time than you think you will need. This will help you avoid extra paperwork if the project takes longer than you expected.

Pre-Interview Research

Frances Buch opened the door to her North Carolina home and welcomed me graciously, if cautiously. Buch had lived alone since the passing of her husband and only knew me from a few telephone conversations. I sensed her tentativeness as I dragged in the video gear and lights. I wondered if my zeal to interview her so quickly after our first phone conversation would hurt her willingness to open up and tell me about her experiences. Frances Buch (Frances Buss before marriage) worked at CBS in New York City from the start of commercial television in 1941 until the mid-1950s. She worked in a variety of areas, both on camera and behind the scenes, and later became the first female director in television. Few people were still alive from the critical early period of television. Frances Buch could provide invaluable insight into an important, overlooked, and understudied era of media history. But she would have to trust me and be willing to recall her experiences.

As I was trying to make her comfortable while I set up the camera, tripod, microphone, and lights, I looked around her living room and something caught my attention. Next to the fireplace, what looked to be a stuffed animal, a lion, peered out from a basket. Without thinking, I blurted out, “Charlemane!!” Frances looked over at me with her eyes widening: “How did you know that!?” In 1954 CBS paired Walter Cronkite with a lion puppet named Charlemane on a morning show in a desperate ploy to match the popularity of chimpanzee J. Fred Muggs on NBC's Today Show. Buch had worked on another short-lived CBS program that involved the lion puppet. She broke into a grin as I told her how I knew the identity of Charlemane. Any tension or apprehension seemed to disappear and Frances Buch and I spent hours discussing her role in early television, providing critical background and details. She had decided to accept me as someone who would understand and appreciate her experiences (Buch, 2008).

You may consider sight recognition of an obscure 1950s television puppet as evidence of mindless trivia – and it might be – but I like to think of it as a benefit of immersing yourself in your area of study. I would not have recognized the puppet without years of studying early television. Frances Buch may have provided a great oral history interview without that moment, but I firmly believe that the more you know about the interviewee's world, the more he or she will be willing to open up to you with his or her memories. This is an insight I learned as a television news reporter. When I interviewed people without a clear understanding of their expertise, they might give superficial answers. But if they felt that I had an understanding, or at least an appreciation or curiosity about their subject, they would often open up and provide greater insight and texture.

In short, the more you know about your research area, the better the oral history interview. You cannot control the memory of your interviewee, and you may not be able to control the length of the interview or even the location, but you can control the amount of knowledge you bring to the subject. As we learned earlier in the section on brain studies, research shows that important information is often not erased from memory, but you need to provide the right cue to access the knowledge. Just as important, the more you have immersed yourself in your area of the research, the better prepared you will be to react to the answers you receive in the interview.

Interview as Data Collection

I try to approach each oral history interview as if I have only one chance to ask questions and react to the answers. I feel I need to collect all my “data” from this person in one or a few sessions over the course of a day or two. In this scenario, it is critical for me to know as much as possible to ask intelligent follow-up questions on the spot. In reality, I usually have had the luxury of following up my oral history interviews with later phone calls, emails, or other correspondence for clarification. But in some cases, I did only have one chance and those interviews are all I have from that person on my research project.

I learned this lesson during one phase of my television news history project. Because of a lack of funding, I first interviewed some key people by telephone. A month or so later, I was able to secure funding to travel to their homes for in-person interviews. As I transcribed the first phone interviews, I realized they had brought up names, places, and even concepts that went right over my head. Even though I thought I was well prepared, it became clear I had more work to do. Luckily, I had the time between the phone and in-person oral history interviews to dig deeper into the existing research and to cast a wider net for information. As a result, the second interviews provided better information and insight.

When you are conducting your literature review, do not forget the human element. Since we are concerned with media research, most of what you are hoping to learn may involve the process and work involved in media or how that media was received. But since you are interviewing people, you should also be versed in their living environment. What was life like during the period you are studying for the people you are interviewing? Their work may have been in midtown Manhattan, the streets of Cairo, the upper peninsula of Michigan, or the plains of western Kansas. How did that affect how they did their work? In other words, your mastery of secondary sources should include not just the research topic, but also the geography and living conditions of the location and time period. Oral history interviews can often provide rich detail about those conditions.

Choosing Your Interviews

Oral historians are haunted by the obituary page. Every death represents the loss of a potential narrator and thus an absolute diminution of society's collective historical memory.

Davis, Back, & MacLean, 1977, pp. 4–5

When thinking about whom you should interview for your research project, the easy answer is to focus on the people who were closest to the specific research questions or hypotheses you are investigating. In reality, you often have to make strategic decisions on your oral history interviewing. First of all, how long ago was the time period you are investigating? To put it bluntly, you may want to focus first on the people who may be the oldest or might be losing their memory. As an oral historian, you want to think about their knowledge and experience as important data that you need to retrieve to provide better insight into an earlier time.

The best way to start thinking about potential interviews is to go through previous research and start writing down names. Check personal archives to see if the individual who donated the material is still living. I have had the best success with an approach called snowball sampling. Lindlof and Taylor (2011) consider snowball sampling “well suited to studying social networks, subcultures, or people who have certain attributes in common” (p. 114). I get in touch with one of the first people I find and then ask them to name other people who were involved in that area. They can provide phone numbers or email addresses. Then I contact those people and also ask them for names. If the number of potential interviewees gets large, I start a database with all the names. Then I can add any information I find out about that person, including who gave me the referral, any mentions in the existing literature, and any contact information.

Through your research, you may have identified a group of people who would be potential oral history interviewees. You can ask yourself several questions about each member of your potential interview group to create a rank-order list. Has the person already written a book or article about his or her experiences? Has someone else written about this person? Has someone else already conducted an oral history interview with this person? Did the person keep a journal during the period in question? If the answer is yes to any of the above questions, you may be able to hold off on talking to this person, for now.

How close was the person to the event or time period you are studying? Would they have been in a position to have first-hand knowledge of what you are studying? I often identify people who may not have first-hand knowledge of the specific topic I am studying at that moment, but they were present, either at the company or at a competing media outlet. They can often provide important context and perspective for the period, but they are not as important as the people directly involved.

Once you start working on your list, contact those you can find. It is best to talk to them on the telephone so you can get a sense of what they may remember and their interest in helping you on the project. Are they retired or are they still working? That can be a critical question because people who are still working often have less time and are less inclined to carve out time for you.

Interview Logistics

Two of the key attributes of oral history interviews are that they must be recorded and they cannot be rushed, whether the conversation be face to face or by telephone. You need to plan for a lengthy discussion on the topic, defined by the Oral History Association (2009) as including “sufficient time allowed for the narrators to give their story the fullness they desire.” The length of an oral history interview can vary considerably and is determined by a number of factors, including the wishes of the interview subject, time constraints, and budget. When I conduct interviews, I hope to record a minimum of two hours of questions and answers.

One of the critical logistical questions involves conducting the interview in person or via the telephone or the Internet. If all of your interview subjects live in your city, the decision may not be that difficult. In most cases though, interviewing by phone or Skype is quicker and less expensive than traveling, and some people may feel more comfortable opening up if there is physical distance from the person asking questions.

You also need to decide if you plan to record the interview on audio alone, or combined with video. Charles Hardy III believes the audio recording is key in oral history because the “articulation of thought and memory are first aural, not visual processes” (Hardy, 2009, p. 399). For Brien Williams, the visual adds context: “Videotaping reveals physical gestures and facial expressions that can greatly expand on the meaning of the spoken word. A smirk signaling irony accompanying a statement would pass unnoticed in an aural recording, unless noted by an attentive interviewer and indicated in the transcript” (Williams, 2011, p. 268).

Personally, I feel I can make a stronger connection if I am in the same room with the person. My strategy for the important interviews is to first record a phone conversation and then later interview those people on video in person. Through decades of interviewing, first as a television journalist and now as an oral historian, I have come up with some strategies for maximizing the quality of the interviews while working with a tight budget. These tips are for in-person sessions, but can be adopted for distance interviews.

1. Comfortable interview location: Whenever possible, interview people where they are most comfortable, most likely in their home. They are more likely to open up and talk freely about a topic if they are not nervous or trying to negotiate an unknown space. Quite frankly, when I am traveling, I do not have the money to rent an interview location anyway, so the person's home is usually the best option I have.
2. Adapt to their schedule: You want to schedule the interview at a time of day when they are most alert. Whenever possible, let the subject choose the starting time. If they are early risers, be ready to talk to them at 7 a.m. if that is what they prefer. Adjust your needs to their schedules.
3. Limit each session: Always keep in mind that it is exhausting to sit and try to remember events from long ago. People tend to get tired after an hour or two of oral history interviews. Watch your subject closely to see how he or she is holding up during the interview. Some people try to mask their fatigue and continue. You can often tell when they are starting to get tired. Their once precise and detailed stories start to become more scattered and vague. This could be an example of different recalls of different portions of the subject, but it could be a sign that they just cannot access that information at that point.
4. Pay close attention to interview location and potential distractions: Once you start the interview, you want to limit the number of interruptions or distractions. If the subject needs to stop the interview for any reason, it may take precious minutes to restart the interview and get refocused on the subject. So I spend a considerable amount of time arranging an interview setting to limit interruptions. I usually ask the person to choose a comfortable chair in the room where they would like to do the interview. If they normally like to prop up their feet, I make sure they have that option. I always ask if they would like a glass of water within reach.

If possible, I ask them to turn off their telephones. During an oral history interview with the late Don Hewitt in his CBS 60 Minutes office, I quickly realized one of the most powerful men in television news often answered his own phone, whether the call was from an important politician or just a delivery guy at the front desk dropping off a package. Luckily, Hewitt realized the problem of the distractions and agreed to unplug his phone during the interview.

Recording Technology

Quite simply, without a recording of the conversation, you cannot call it oral history. The recording becomes an aural or visual document. For that reason, you do not want to take any chances with the recording part of the process. Use the best and most reliable audio recorder or video camera that your budget will allow. Bring backup batteries and equipment. Anyone who has spent time recording audio and/or video for a living knows that equipment always fails at the most important time. Have some kind of backup plan in case of equipment problems.

Know your equipment. Even with decades of experience, I always carve out time the night before or on the morning of an interview to go over my video camera to make sure I understand how it works and how to set up and record the interview. Not only will that greatly reduce the chance of a recording problem but it also puts the person at ease. Legendary television news storyteller Larry Hatteberg of KAKE-TV in Wichita, Kansas, says you need to know your equipment well enough that you can set it up easily and without complications when you are sitting in a person's living room. If you draw undue attention to the recording equipment, you can make the interview subject nervous. If you are confident in your equipment, you can carry on a conversation with the person while you get the recorder ready for the interview.

Recording Audio

Most oral history interviews are recorded on audio. Audio interviews are much easier and less obtrusive than video interviews. When deciding on what audio equipment to use, you want to first think about how you would like to use the recordings in the future. If you are merely preserving a record of the interview you may not be as concerned about the quality, but you must be able to easily understand what the person and interviewer are saying on the recording. If you may be using the interviews in an audio documentary or online, you want to make sure the sound is clear and of high quality. If I am going to the trouble and expense of traveling to another location to talk with someone in person, I may as well go the extra step to insure the recording is more than just a historical record and can serve further purposes.

Most audio recorders come with a built-in microphone. Avoid using these microphones because they tend to amplify other sounds and drown out the interview. I have spent countless hours in archives straining to hear recordings using the built-in microphone. Invest in a separate microphone, preferably a lavaliere (“lav”) microphone that can be clipped to a shirt, pointing in the direction of the mouth. People usually forget they are wearing a lav microphone soon after the interview begins.

Be sure that you ask your questions in a loud enough voice that you can be heard on the microphone clipped to the subject's shirt. It is important that the questions are audible in an oral history interview so future scholars will know what questions led to specific answers. Some oral historians use two microphones so both the questions and answers are clear, but that adds another level of complexity and more equipment that can go wrong. I usually stick with one microphone and make sure I ask the questions loud enough that I can later hear them when transcribing the interview.

Listen closely for noise distractions. It is amazing how much noise an air conditioner or refrigerator can make when you are listening to an audio recording of an interview. I have sometimes asked if we could turn off an air conditioner during the interview to limit the noise distractions.

Always wear headphones or at least earbuds when recording an oral history interview. You need to know how the person sounds as the voice is being recorded. If you are not listening to the interview through the recording device, you have no idea whether or not there is a problem with your audio.

Recording Video

If you are shooting the interview on video, you want to be cognizant of the setting within the video frame. You do not want anything in the background to cause a distraction for someone watching the interview later. For these considerations, I use the strategies that I learned as a video journalist. You want a background that is a subtle visual cue of where you are, without taking away from the person or the memories. In other words, you do not want a house plant to appear to be growing out of the person's head. You do not want a distracting television or computer screen in the background. You do not want to interview the person in front of a window, with the light coming in behind them, which makes it hard to see him or her clearly. If possible, I make sure the chair is a few feet from the wall, so I can focus on the subject and cause the background to be slightly out of focus, once again directing attention to the person being interviewed.

When shooting a video interview, you may also have to make compromises on comfort versus on-camera appearance. I try to avoid overstuffed chairs or couches because a person can sink right down into the furniture. While they may be comfortable, it does not usually present a flattering view of the person. For that reason, I try to choose a straight back chair, as long as they do not mind sitting in such a position for an extended period of time.

You will also want to decide in advance why you are interviewing the person on video. Are you merely creating a video and audio record of the session? Would you like to use these interviews for an online project or even a documentary? The answers to these questions will determine how you prepare for a video interview. Decisions are usually based primarily on the budget – which for me is usually very small.

With decades of experience as a video journalist, I am comfortable with video cameras and know how to achieve the quality level acceptable for daily journalism. But I also often work alone and want to travel light. I may bring a few stand lights to help improve the look of the interview setting, but I do not have the time or budget for the often hours-long setup time for interviews used for news magazine shows or well-funded documentaries. I always use a sturdy tripod, so my shot is steady and I can concentrate on my questions. I try to find a pleasing head-and-shoulders frame for the interview, and then rarely change the shot during the interview.

When shooting your own video oral history interviews, be sure to sit right next to the camera so you can see the camera screen. I try to position myself so I can keep eye contact with the interview subject and occasionally lean over and look at the camera screen to make sure the person is still in the frame.

Whether you are recording video or audio, be sure to start each recording with key information including your name, location of interview, and date. You can say the names of the interviewees or have them pronounce their names. It does not hurt to also have them spell their names.

Questions

Your questions are the key to a successful oral history interview. The questions are the culmination of all of your research into the subject matter. As you read the literature to prepare for your research project, you should be jotting down ideas and questions. Your questions should revolve around two main areas: (1) What information and insight do you need to help test your hypotheses or to provide illumination into your research questions? (2) In what area of your research does the oral history subject have direct involvement?

For a historian, the traditional printed primary sources will only reveal so much information. The person's experiences will often help you understand the process and context involved in creating those documents or other media. For example, you could combine oral history and content analysis to study the newspaper and television coverage of the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. In the content analysis portion of the project, you can design a codebook to study the words and pictures used in the newspaper coverage and the use of visuals and sources in the television coverage. But the content analysis will only allow you to study the message itself. Any inferences about the intent of the journalists involved are speculation. Oral history interviews with the reporters and other journalists may provide insight and context into how and why the riots were covered in a particular way. You can find out what roadblocks the reporters had to overcome and what information or visuals never made it into the newspaper or television coverage.

More specifically, you want to create a list of questions for your oral history interview that is longer than the number of questions you will be able to ask in the time you will have. Spend some time putting the questions in order of importance to your research. Have the questions with you during the session so you do not forget a key area when you get into the interview.

Use your list of questions merely as a guide. Let the people you are interviewing set the course for the interview, within reason. Listen to the answers. Be ready to follow up the answer with a question to provide more clarity and detail. If they want to go into great detail, let them. Some people feel the need to provide as much detail as they can, and if you try to interrupt them you may disrupt their process of remembering the event. Studs Terkel compared oral history interviewing to jazz music: “Have a skeletal framework, but be ready to improvise within that” (Terkel, 2009, p. 127).

Do Not Interrogate

This is not 60 Minutes. You are not trying to catch the person in a “gotcha” moment. When I show students portions of some of my interviews in which people are providing wrong information, they sometimes ask why I did not grill them on the incorrect information. You want to remember that you are usually dealing with memory issues, not deception. These people may have long ago transposed events and now that is how they believed the event happened. In the case of information that I suspect is incorrect, I will usually ask a follow-up question to see if the person misspoke or if additional information will help them with the memory. If not, I make a mental note to check out the details later. For researchers in memory studies, the transposed events or incorrect details can be a window into how that particular person has made sense of that part of his or her life.

If your topic includes troubling or embarrassing questions for the interviewee, save those for later in the interview when the person is more comfortable with you and the process. I like Charles T. Morrissey's (2006, p. 190) approach of putting the blame on a mythical future researcher. When he has to ask a tough question, he prefaces it by saying “A future historian would rank me as remiss for not now giving you the opportunity to answer this important question.” This deflection could save you from an abrupt end to the interview if the person takes offense at the question.

Eye Contact

During the interview, concentrate on the person you are interviewing. Only look at your questions and notes when necessary. If you are recording the interview on video, sit next to the camera so you only have to lean over occasionally to make sure the person is still in the frame. The more you can maintain eye contact and genuinely listen, the better the chance that the person will feel comfortable to open up and talk to you. If you spend too much time fiddling with the recording equipment or looking at your notes, the interviewee will sense your disconnect.

Always end your interviews by asking if the person has anything to add or other topics he or she would like to discuss. Usually, he or she will have nothing to add. But occasionally, that final question can be a prompt to provide details and insight you had not even thought to ask. When the interview is finished, genuinely thank the person for his or her time.

Legal Release Form

Before you leave, and more appropriately before you start the interview, you need to talk to the person about how you are going to use the interview. This is not just ethical, but a legal requirement. Laws and their interpretations are constantly changing, but most oral historians follow the basic rule that, unlike in journalism, the interviewee automatically has ownership and copyright of the interview. People own what they say. So you need to have them sign a legal release form that turns the rights over to you, if you want to be able to use the interview in any scholarly projects. The legal release form should spell out clearly how you plan to use the interview. Are you planning to write a book or monograph? Are you designing a museum display? Do you plan an audio or video documentary? Would you like to post all or parts of the interview online? The more detail you include will save you the hassle of going back to the person, or heirs, for approval for a new usage later. A simple web search of “oral history release form” will provide you with examples. Keep in mind the legal release form is often separate from the informed consent form that you may be required to present by your IRB.

But gaining ownership of the interview also brings responsibilities and potential problems. If the person feels he or she has been defamed by the interview (libel in relation to a transcript, or slander with a recorded version), you may be the person targeted in legal action. The interviewee could also sue for being put in a false light or for having private information revealed to the public. Since defamation only involves living people, sometimes a decision is made to keep parts of the interview closed until a person has passed away. This information is mostly geared to oral historians working in the United States. Laws concerning oral history interviews can be dramatically different depending on the country in which you work (Neuenschwander, 2011; Shopes, 2006).

Transcriptions/Electronic Media

One of the key early debates in oral history involved the original recording and the transcriptions of the interview. Some of the early projects, including Columbia University's Oral History Research Office, considered the typed transcript as the primary document. In some cases, the recordings were discarded once the transcriptions were complete. Today, most scholars would agree the recording is the original document and should be preserved. But even with the simplified process of recording and listening to audio and video today, most scholars still find it easier to work with transcripts, especially for research that is designed as a journal article or book.

Interview transcription is one of the most time-consuming but important parts of oral history research. If you have the funds to pay someone else to transcribe your interviews, you will save yourself hours and hours of time. But be ready to still spend some time with the recordings and the transcriptions because someone who does not know the subject is prone to make mistakes on proper names and detailed concepts. On average, transcribing an audio interview takes about one hour per 15 minutes of recorded conversation. This time does allow you to revisit the interview and start to process and analyze the information the person has provided you with.

If I am in a hurry for a conference paper or presentation, I sometimes start with a shortcut method I used as a television journalist. I will listen to the entire interview without stopping, make note of key concepts and ideas and mark where they are on the recording. I put asterisks by comments that I think might work as direct quotes or sound bites. When I am finished, I will go back and type out verbatim the sections I would like to use. I must still force myself to go back later and complete the transcription because it is critical that the information be available for other scholars. Be sure to put all the important information at the top of each transcription: interviewee's name, interviewer's name, date, location, and name of transcriber. You can also add any other information that would help someone who comes across the transcript in the future.

Transcript Approval

During the 2012 US presidential campaign, a journalism ethics debate arose after the New York Times published a story revealing the apparently common practice of quote approval for politicians and political operatives in exchange for access. Reporters agreed to send the quotes they planned to use back to the person for approval. Those quotes were then approved, changed, or deleted without the public knowing about the deal (Peters, 2012). Journalists were quick to criticize this practice. Former CBS anchor Dan Rather (2012) called it a “jaw dropping turn in journalism” which benefited the politicians and hurt the public. Inherent in this debate is journalists' belief that the recorded answer to a question is closest to the “truth.” If you let people approve quotes, they will attempt to smooth out or eliminate any discrepancies or answers that are not flattering. Also inherent in this debate is that most journalists feel they “own” the interview after it is recorded and the interviewee should have little say as to its use.

This is an area where journalism and oral history diverge. Oral historians must acknowledge the interview is a collaborative experience. Most oral historians believe it is imperative that you send a transcript and a copy of the recorded interview to the person for approval. The interviewee is allowed to delete information, make changes to what was said, or place an embargo on some material until a later date. This version of “quote approval” acknowledges the agency of the people you interview. You are not just collecting data. Interviewees are critical partners in your research.

Oral History Interview Analysis and Interpretation

The strategies and approaches of analyzing and interpreting oral history interviews are as varied as the number of disciplines that have turned to this method to explore their research questions. As with all qualitative research methods, the original research idea and reasons for choosing oral history will help guide you in making sense of what people said and how they said it. In general, we can separate the method into two areas: oral history as one of the sources in a historical research project and oral history or memory studies projects in which the interviews are the primary texts.

In historical research, oral histories are usually utilized as one of several primary sources to try and understand a past event or period of time. The interviews are included along with written documents, personal archives, and other evidence from the past. In these projects, the validity of the information in the interviews is critical. Researchers use the triangulation method, comparing the information in the interviews to other primary sources, to assess the level of confidence they have that the memories are accurate.

Oral history interviews can provide more texture and fill in details that cannot be found in printed historical documents. Oral history provides a human element to historic research. The information can include personal thoughts during an important period, insight into specific work processes, and details on family life. “Generalizations are the curse of oral history memoirs, and specifics are often the nuggets that make them glitter” (Morrissey, 2006, p. 192). Because oral history has provided access to people and groups previously invisible in historical research, Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2006) consider it a feminist method, by allowing scholars “to get at the valuable knowledge and rich life experience of marginalized persons and groups that would otherwise remain untapped, and specifically, offers a way of accessing subjugated voices” (p. 151).

Oral history interviews also allow you to add personal stories to your manuscript. I try to create a narrative structure in my research, so I often use the oral history interviews as a journalist uses quotations or sound bites in a story. The direct quotes provide a pacing element and add a human element to the media topic. Therefore, when I am analyzing my transcripts, I am looking for sections of answers that would be the right topic and length to fit into the manuscripts in certain points (Conway, 2009b). For those scholars working beyond the printed word, the recorded interviews are a key component to audio and video documentaries.

In the area of oral history projects and in memory studies, the interviews are the data. The validity of the information in the interviews is of less concern than the memories themselves. Scholars accept and embrace the subjectivity involved in the process of remembering past events. For Valerie Yow (2005), oral history's “subjectivity is at once inescapable and crucial to an understanding of the meaning we give our past and present. To reveal the meanings of lived experience is the great task of qualitative research and specifically oral history interviews” (p. 23). In his oral history work, Studs Terkel valued the unique way each person made sense of past events: “I'm not looking for some abstraction as the truth, because it doesn't exist. What I'm looking for is the truth for them” (Terkel & Parker, 2009, p. 125).

The analysis and interpretation of oral history interviews follows a similar path to all qualitative research, a process that is unique to each project but with strategies that have proven successful over time. One of the most popular approaches involves grounded theory. This approach, first introduced by Glaser and Strauss, involves analyzing the interviews and creating as many categories as possible. The categories may be influenced by previous research, but should also percolate from a close read of the interview transcripts (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Larson, 2006). These categories can be further refined as you read through the transcripts repeatedly. John Bodnar (1989) started an oral history project on automotive plant workers to learn about management–employee relations. Through analysis of the interviews, he realized the individual memories were in part a product of social discourse: “individuals did not remember alone; they discussed the events of their experience and formulated explanations of what had occurred in their lives with other people” (p. 1202).

For those scholars interested in narrative theory, the oral history interviews provide texts that are rich with insight into how people make sense of their lives. Mary Chamberlain (2008, p. 161) considers all oral history interviews as narratives, as

In this approach, the method is less of an interview and more of a “jointly created conversational narrative performance” (McMahan, 2008, p. 95).

In some cases, a single oral history interview can inspire a book-length project. Elizabeth Burgos-Debray spent countless hours interviewing a Guatemalan peasant woman, then chose to use only the words of the woman she interviewed, adding an introduction to orient the readers. The book, I, Rigoberta Menchu, brought the woman's story to light with Menchu later winning the Nobel Peace Prize (Menchu & Burgos-Debray, 1984).

Presentation and Classroom Use

An added value of the recorded interview is apparent at conference presentations and in the classroom. While I grumble about the effort that goes into shooting my interviews on digital video, those visual recordings mean that I can show my students and fellow researchers the actual people who were involved in my research. In a 10 minute conference or panel presentation sandwiched between other scholars' presentations, sound and video clips can draw attention to the work you are doing. In my journalism history class, the students tend to perk up when the boring professor stops talking and they can watch Walter Cronkite remember his early efforts in local television news or Frances Buch explain how it felt to be promoted as a sex symbol as CBS's first female television director.

Oral History Repository

Another important aspect of oral history is that you are not just interviewing that person for your current project. You are recording the conversation as a record, for use by future scholars. Before embarking on an oral history project, you need to think about how you will save and protect the recordings as well as make them available to others who are interested in the topic. The best solution is to find a library or archive that would be willing to house your recorded interviews. Having an established repository for your oral history interviews not only makes them available to others; if the archive is known for that area of research, it provides one location for future scholars to access material.

Summary and Conclusion

The effectiveness of oral history as a research method has been shown by its acceptance by a wide range of academic disciplines, from narrative studies to psychology. For media studies, oral history interviews can shed some light on some of the most elusive questions including how and why things happened.

The oral history interview also brings a personal element to media studies. The human aspect and personal connection can enhance both the scholarship and the research experience. Spending time with people who played an important role in media helps bring you, the researcher, much closer to the subject you are studying. The topic becomes more human, more nuanced. If you focus your attention on reception studies, oral history can help you understand how people use media, how it becomes part of their lives.

When you record oral history interviews, you are not only adding to your own scholarship, you are a partner in helping to preserve important information for future scholars, information that may have been lost if you had not gone to the trouble of finding and interviewing your subjects. Oral history can be a rewarding research method, giving you personal access to the very people responsible for the media that are so important to our lives.

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