Active Listening in Oral History Interviews

Theoretical Foundations and Practical Solutions

Written By Mahya Hafezi
Translated by Mandana Karimi

2025-9-26

The Oral History Website, in order to better understand the problems and challenges of producing oral history works or memoirs, has conducted interviews with several experts and practitioners in this field. These will be presented as short notes.

In an Oral History Interview, the Goal Is Not Just to Record Casual Conversations

The purpose of an oral history interview is not merely to record everyday conversations or scattered memories, but to extract accurate and documented data that play a key role in reconstructing events and analyzing historical trends. One of the most important skills for an interviewer to achieve this goal is active listening. This skill differs from passive hearing and requires analysis, processing, purposeful responses, and guiding the flow of the interview. In what follows, this skill will be examined from both theoretical and practical perspectives.

Definition and Importance of Active Listening

Active listening means consciously and purposefully hearing the interviewee’s words, analyzing them in real time, evaluating their content, and deciding on follow-up questions. Unlike passive listening, active listening requires full mental presence, prior knowledge of the subject, and the ability to interpret body language and emotional reactions of the interviewee.

In oral history, active listening is especially crucial, as interviews are often conducted with key individuals, eyewitnesses, or those with lived experiences. Even a small lapse in hearing or analyzing their words can result in the loss of valuable information.

Preparations for Active Listening Before the Interview

Active listening begins before the interview session starts. An interviewer who enters a session unprepared will be unable to effectively guide the conversation. The three main areas of preparation include:

1. Studying and Understanding the Topic

The interviewer must thoroughly study the topic before the session. Prior knowledge allows them to analyze what the interviewee says, identify contradictions, and pick up on clues worth following up on. An unprepared interviewer becomes a passive listener and cannot ask in-depth questions or detect ambiguities.

2. Familiarity with the Interviewee

A key component of active listening is having some familiarity with the interviewee’s personality beforehand. This includes their catchphrases, speaking habits, body language, pace of speech, storytelling style, and even family and social background. Such familiarity helps the interviewer interpret nonverbal cues like pauses, tone shifts, or hand gestures and uncover hidden meanings behind the interviewee’s words.

3. Strengthening Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is a critical tool for building effective communication. Inappropriate emotional reactions can disrupt the interview environment. For example, excessive joy or obvious surprise at certain statements might prompt the interviewee to exaggerate or self-censor. Therefore, the interviewer must control their emotions beforehand and practice skills such as empathy, self-awareness, and emotional regulation.

Active Listening Skills During the Interview

Active listening is not limited to preparation—it requires specific skills during the interview itself. The interviewer must simultaneously listen, manage the conversation, take notes on key points, and guide the interview toward research goals through purposeful responses.

1. Fast and Purposeful Note-Taking

The interviewer should have a basic skill in shorthand or fast writing. It's neither possible nor helpful to transcribe every sentence. But quickly noting key points, important phrases, and valuable leads is essential. Using symbols and abbreviations helps store vital information while continuing to listen.

2. Managing Emotional Intelligence

During the interview, the interviewer must apply emotional intelligence in practice. Timely smiles, subtle affirmations, or expressions of empathy can encourage the interviewee to keep sharing. Conversely, intentionally ignoring some statements signals that they’re not relevant to the research, steering the interviewee toward more important topics.

3. Real-Time Summarization

The interviewer must mentally organize and summarize the interviewee’s statements as they’re being spoken. This skill prevents repetition of questions or stagnation in the dialogue and helps structure the interview effectively.

Emphasis and Direction in the Interview

Conscious emphasis by the interviewer on specific parts of the interviewee’s statements determines the direction and quality of the conversation.

• Emphasis on emotional/storytelling moments: This steers the interview toward storytelling and recreating dramatic scenes.

• Emphasis on moments of hesitation or ambiguity: Focusing on pauses, uncertainties, and unclear points can yield deeper, more analytical insights.

The interviewer can use body language, eye contact, tone changes, timely silence, and targeted questions to guide the interviewee’s mind and extract the desired research content.

The Line Between Scientific Interviews and Casual Conversations

A scientific interview must be distinguished from casual chat. Although informal conversation helps build rapport, it should not replace the main goal: extracting research data. A professional interviewer uses casual talk as a tool to reduce fatigue and build trust—but knows when to steer the conversation back to serious topics.

Characteristics of a Professional Interviewer

A professional interviewer is someone who, beyond academic mastery of the subject, also possesses high-level communication and interpersonal skills. They can manage their emotions and separate personal interests from research needs to keep the interview aligned with academic goals.

Such a person is neither intimidated by the interviewee’s status nor enamored with their personality. They maintain intellectual independence, ask brave questions, and control the session with respectful but firm behavior. Drawing on their knowledge and experience, they can turn every interview into a documented, valuable source for historical research.

The Role of Active Listening in Oral History Interviews

In oral history, active listening is not just a personal skill—it’s a scientific and research tool. The interviewer must attentively listen, record details, and mentally structure the overall narrative. This process requires high focus, patience, and knowledge of interview techniques.

Active listening enables the interviewer to not only capture the narrative accurately, but also to notice nonverbal cues, tone of voice, and emotions, thus gaining a fuller, more authentic picture of historical experiences.

In some countries, these skills are systematically taught, and interviewers conduct sessions as professional researchers using precise scientific guidelines. In contrast, local and traditional experiences often rely on human relationships, emotional trust, and cultural interactions. While this leads to intimate and heartfelt narratives, lack of scientific methodology may weaken the research’s precision and coherence.

In certain cultures, interviews are more structured due to greater openness in communication and wider reading habits. Interviewers and interviewees are less constrained by social niceties or taboos and can address issues more directly.

Greater directness, broader education, career choice based on interest, and lower concern for privacy in the West—compared to Eastern cultures—often allow for more accurate data collection. However, the lack of traditional privacy boundaries and unfiltered expression can also result in culturally unrefined information. Conversely, in societies like Iran, the interviewer must work harder to earn trust and guide the session skillfully in order to extract accurate data from cautious narratives.

Combining these two approaches—using scientific methods while understanding local cultural and social contexts—can create an effective model for improving the quality of oral history interviews.

Deep Listening: The Essence of Oral History

In oral history, interviewing depends more on deep and intelligent listening than on asking many questions. The interviewer must find the "pulse" of the interviewee, gain their trust, and simultaneously guide the conversation toward research goals without losing control of the session. Otherwise, the interviewee may take over the conversation and derail the intended purpose of the session.

Conclusion

Active listening in oral history interviews is a skill that combines knowledge, experience, communication art, and real-time analysis. It begins with preparation before the session, continues with note-taking, emotion management, real-time summarization, and intentional emphasis during the interview, and ultimately leads to the collection of deep, precise, and valuable historical data.

An oral history interviewer is not just a listener, but also an analyst, a conversation manager, and a narrative guide. Without this skill, the interview becomes a mere casual chat. But with active listening, historical narratives are transformed from scattered memories into credible documents for future generations.