Oral History Method — Oral History Research

Both use in-depth recorded interviews, but oral history is specifically oriented toward the past — it treats the narrator's account as a historical primary source and typically culminates in archival deposit. Social-science qualitative interviews are usually oriented toward understanding current social processes or experiences and are not systematically archived for future reuse. Oral history also places greater analytic emphasis on memory, narrative structure, and the historical context of the account.

Oral historians do not require memory to be factually accurate in order to be valid. Portelli's foundational argument is that errors, omissions, and retrospective reframings are themselves significant data — they reveal how narrators make sense of the past in the present. Oral testimony is triangulated with other sources (documents, photographs, other interviews) to assess factual claims, while its interpretive and narrative dimensions are analysed in their own right.

There is no fixed minimum, but projects typically involve 10 to 30 narrators for a focused study. The criterion is not statistical saturation but thematic richness and perspectival diversity — enough voices to capture the range of experience within the community or event under study. Some landmark projects have involved hundreds of narrators; small community projects may be valuable with fewer than ten.

Core obligations include obtaining written informed consent before recording, explaining how the interview will be used and archived, giving narrators the right to review and amend transcripts, respecting requests for anonymity or embargo on sensitive material, and ensuring that archival deposit terms match what was promised. Many institutions and oral history associations publish detailed ethical guidelines that should be consulted at the design stage.

Yes — tools such as NVivo, ATLAS.ti, or MAXQDA can assist with coding transcripts, organising themes, and linking excerpts to recordings. However, the interpretive work — understanding how narrators construct their accounts, what silences mean, and how memory shapes the narrative — remains the researcher's intellectual responsibility. Software supports organisation; interpretation cannot be automated.