Wow. I just realized that all my posts on the front page of my blog are from February. That hasn't happened in awhile.
The book I'm reading smells like old book. But contains some important points, so I will proceed with the review.
Hoffman, Alice. "Reliability and Validity." In Dunaway, David K and Willa K. Baum, Eds., Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History in cooperation with the Oral History Association, 1984. (clearly I need to learn how to cite correctly. Whatever. You get the idea.) First appeared in Today's Speech 22 (Winter 1974), pp. 23-27.
"One of the persistent challenges presented by scholars to oral history regards the reliability and the validity of the interviews. In this connection reliability can be defined as the consistency with which an individual will tell the same story about the same events on a number of different occasions. Validity refers to the degree of conformity between the reports of the event itself as recorded by other primary resource material such as documents, photographs, diaries, and letters. Now, while it is inconceivable that an oral report might be a true description of an event, its validity cannot really be tested unless it can be measured against some body of evidence. Without such evidence, an isolated description of an event becomes a bit of esoterica whose worth cannot be properly identified." (p.69-70).
Tuchman, Barbara. "The Significant and the Insignificant." in the book cited above. First appeared in Radcliffe Quarterly 56 (October 1972), pp. 9-10.
"The chief difficulty in contemporary history is over-documentation or what has been called, less charitably, the multiplication of rubbish... with all sorts of people being invited merely to open their mouths, and ramble effortlessly and endlessly into a tape recorder, prodded daily by an acolyte of Oral History, a few veins of gold and a vast mass of trash are being preserved which would otherwise have gone to dust. We are drowning ourselves in uneeded information." (p. 76)
Cutler III, William. "Accuracy in Interviewing." Same, Ibid, whatevs. First appeared in Historical Methods Newsletter 3 (June 1970), pp. 1-7.
Basically he says that interviewees have a tendency to inflate or deflate their role in events, that they are concerned for posterity and warp the truth, and that the interviewer must be prepared with information but even then it might not help him get an accurate interview.
Friedlander, Peter. "Theory, Method, and Oral History." Same.
Refutes idea that validity must come from a triangulation of archival records, because in his stody of the Local 229 of the UAW, census data breaks up the individuals into foreign and non-foreign born, but among the latter he sees three distinct groups in his interviews with Local president Edumund Kord. No archival or document record of these groups exists. He writes that "the same problems [of a lack of documentary evidence] emerge in regard to other major questions," which include phenomenological queries such as how the workers experienced their relationship to authority, who were the leaders and what was the structure of leadership within the group, and how the workers' struggle for power impacted their personal lives and sense of social class or status. (p. 133).
The book I'm reading smells like old book. But contains some important points, so I will proceed with the review.
Hoffman, Alice. "Reliability and Validity." In Dunaway, David K and Willa K. Baum, Eds., Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History in cooperation with the Oral History Association, 1984. (clearly I need to learn how to cite correctly. Whatever. You get the idea.) First appeared in Today's Speech 22 (Winter 1974), pp. 23-27.
"One of the persistent challenges presented by scholars to oral history regards the reliability and the validity of the interviews. In this connection reliability can be defined as the consistency with which an individual will tell the same story about the same events on a number of different occasions. Validity refers to the degree of conformity between the reports of the event itself as recorded by other primary resource material such as documents, photographs, diaries, and letters. Now, while it is inconceivable that an oral report might be a true description of an event, its validity cannot really be tested unless it can be measured against some body of evidence. Without such evidence, an isolated description of an event becomes a bit of esoterica whose worth cannot be properly identified." (p.69-70).
Tuchman, Barbara. "The Significant and the Insignificant." in the book cited above. First appeared in Radcliffe Quarterly 56 (October 1972), pp. 9-10.
"The chief difficulty in contemporary history is over-documentation or what has been called, less charitably, the multiplication of rubbish... with all sorts of people being invited merely to open their mouths, and ramble effortlessly and endlessly into a tape recorder, prodded daily by an acolyte of Oral History, a few veins of gold and a vast mass of trash are being preserved which would otherwise have gone to dust. We are drowning ourselves in uneeded information." (p. 76)
Cutler III, William. "Accuracy in Interviewing." Same, Ibid, whatevs. First appeared in Historical Methods Newsletter 3 (June 1970), pp. 1-7.
Basically he says that interviewees have a tendency to inflate or deflate their role in events, that they are concerned for posterity and warp the truth, and that the interviewer must be prepared with information but even then it might not help him get an accurate interview.
Friedlander, Peter. "Theory, Method, and Oral History." Same.
Refutes idea that validity must come from a triangulation of archival records, because in his stody of the Local 229 of the UAW, census data breaks up the individuals into foreign and non-foreign born, but among the latter he sees three distinct groups in his interviews with Local president Edumund Kord. No archival or document record of these groups exists. He writes that "the same problems [of a lack of documentary evidence] emerge in regard to other major questions," which include phenomenological queries such as how the workers experienced their relationship to authority, who were the leaders and what was the structure of leadership within the group, and how the workers' struggle for power impacted their personal lives and sense of social class or status. (p. 133).
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