Oral History with which approach?

Iranian Oral History Website
Translated by Mandana Karimi

2025-7-24

At a general glance, it appears that oral history can be considered from three approaches.

The first approach is to regard oral history as a technique or method for collecting data. In this view, oral history is conceived as a triangle, with one side representing the interviewee, the second side the interviewer or oral historian, and the third side the medium of transmission—either audio or video recording—that can create and actualize the intersubjective thought between the interviewer and interviewee. According to this approach, if any of these components is absent in the process of producing information, oral history does not occur.

Most practitioners of oral history, including research institutions and archival organizations in Iran that are actively engaged in this field, adopt this approach. Even the Oral History Association, established in Europe in 1968, while emphasizing its technical nature, defines oral history as an active, conscious, and purposeful conversation between the interviewer and interviewee for the reconstruction and representation of a specific subject, occurring through audio and video interviews, followed by indexing, documentation, and archival storage.[1]

The second approach sees oral history as a method for collecting information. In this approach, various methods of information gathering are considered—ranging from the design of pre-structured question packages to more direct face-to-face conversations using spontaneous, unplanned questions. Each method shapes and advances the conversation in its own way.

Articles and papers presented at conferences and seminars on methodology, phenomenology, and the design of question packages have addressed oral history from a methodological point of view, evaluating the effectiveness and goal attainment of each approach.

This approach recommends using research methods and concepts from psychology, anthropology, statistics, and historical sociology in oral history. It’s important to mention that prior to the emergence of postmodern thought in the 1980s, the theoretical and methodological frameworks in these disciplines were largely based on quantitative indicators and positivist methods. The use of such methods in sociology and historical research created numerous problems, ultimately leading to inconsistencies in the interpretation of similar historical events.

While some still consider this approach appropriate for data analysis, the emergence of postmodern approaches and the growing importance of qualitative indicators and hermeneutic interpretations of historical events and phenomena have led historical sociology, over the past three decades, to evolve into a discipline that is methodologically and theoretically distinct from traditional sociology. As a result, it has become essential to reshape the research positioning of this new field so that both sociologists and oral historians can study topics that traditional history and sociology have struggled to address independently.

The third approach considers oral history as a form of historical knowledge, in which qualitative indicators are the most important. Achieving and understanding such historical knowledge requires answering several important questions. For example:

Does oral history represent a distinct concept from history in general?

Is oral history a modern phenomenon, or does it have roots in oral traditions and older research methods?

And other similar questions.

To answer such questions, it is first necessary to understand how the concept of history was used in the past and what position it held in comparison to other sciences. When did transformations in the concept of history begin, and what path did they follow for history to become a science? What relationship can be established between history in the general sense and oral history? And finally, what mechanisms can be used in oral history to access factual realities?

At the end of this section, two points should be emphasized:

In all three approaches, conversation and interview play a central role in the collection, organization, compilation, and production of historical text. In other words, all oral history activities are validated through dialogue.

The interviewer or oral historian primarily relies on the spoken accounts of narrative sources rather than written documents for creating the text, without disregarding the importance of written sources, or adopting an indifferent stance toward them.[2]