Compare methods

	Oral History Methodology	Witness Reliability Triangulation
Field	Historiography	Historiography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1978	1970
Originator	Paul Thompson; Allan Nevins	Classical source-critical tradition; formalized via triangulation in social science
Type	qualitative interview method	qualitative evidential method
Seminal source	Thompson, P. (2000). The Voice of the Past: Oral History (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780192893178	Howell, M., & Prevenier, W. (2001). From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods. Cornell University Press. ISBN: 9780801485602
Aliases	Oral History, Life-Story Interviewing, Testimony Collection, Recorded Memory Work	Source Triangulation, Corroboration Analysis, Testimony Cross-Checking, Convergence of Evidence
Related	4	4
Summary	Oral history methodology is the craft of generating historical evidence by recording interviews with living witnesses about their experiences and life stories. Unlike most historical sources, which the historian finds already made, oral history sources are created by the historian in collaboration with the narrator, which gives the method both its distinctive power and its distinctive problems. Pioneered institutionally by Allan Nevins at Columbia in the 1940s and given its fullest theorization by Paul Thompson, whose The Voice of the Past (1978) is the field's classic statement, oral history was animated by a democratic impulse to recover the experiences of ordinary people, workers, women, migrants, the colonized, who left few written records. The method requires careful interview design and conduct, faithful recording and archiving, and critical interpretation alert to the workings of memory. Far from treating recollection as a flawed substitute for documents, mature oral history studies memory and subjectivity as themselves valuable historical evidence about how people make meaning of the past.	Witness reliability triangulation is the procedure by which a historian combines several testimonies about the same event to reach a justified conclusion about what happened. It rests on a simple but powerful logic: a single account, however vivid, may be mistaken or self-serving, but when independent sources that could not have colluded converge on the same point, the probability that they are all wrong in the same way becomes small. The method, descended from the classical source-critical tradition and sharpened by the social-scientific concept of triangulation associated with Donald Campbell and Norman Denzin, requires the historian to inventory the available testimonies, assess each one's reliability and bias through internal criticism, establish whether the sources are genuinely independent, and then treat their agreement as corroboration while explaining their disagreements. The same Bayesian intuition underlies the use of multiple, independent evidentiary streams in process-tracing case analysis. Triangulation is how disparate, fallible sources are turned into defensible historical knowledge.