A response to an article from 1999... ok so I'm a bit late.

Response to Dougherty, Jack. “From Anecdote to Analysis: Oral Interviews and New Scholarship in Educational History.” The Journal of American History. September 1999.

I'm working on this response to an article about developing more scientific validity in oral history. Those things just don't seem to match up. I was thinking about it last night and decided to just start writing as a way to try and figure out my thoughts. Basically, I see oral history as, well, history. While more stories definitely add to the validity of history, I don't think that the language and concepts that govern other social science research will add validity to oral history. Things like getting a sample size that is representative of... well, whatever population you're going to study... that's how you would build a social science research design.

So what, I'm supposed to find a sampling of 80-year old deans emeriti from Georgetown who worked in foreign and second language education? Oh wait - yeah, there aren't too many of those. I'm being cute, but you see my point. More stories can triangulate your data, but using that language suggests that oral history is generalizable. History is not generalizable - it stems from a certain historical and cultural moment.

I'm still working out the details here. I like the idea of taking the terms reliability and validity which are used in social science research design and talking about how they mean different things for oral history. Ultimately, it becomes a question of ethics - is the oral historian handling the testimony of their participants in an ethical way? The answer determines whether or not the research is reliable and valid.