Oral History School-4

Oral History Interviewer Should Be “Patient”, “Cautious”, and “Unbiased”

Adjusted by Maryam Asadi Jafari
Translated by Ruhollah Golmoradi

2024-8-30

According to Iranian Oral History Website, the fourth online session of “Oral History School” was held by Iranian History Association on Tuesday evening, July 9, 2024. In this session, Dr. Abolfazl Hasanabadi gave a lecture focused on “Interview: Stages and Manners”.

At the beginning of this session, Dr. Hasanabadi mentioned his 20 years of activity in the field of oral history and said, “Many projects have been carried out during these years at Organization of Libraries, Museums and Documents Center of Astan Quds Razavi and more than 20 thousand hours of interviews have been recorded on the subject range of political and social history to history of literature and religious bodies. The structure and nature of oral history is easy but difficult, which shows itself perfectly in the interview stage. On the one hand, it is easy because anyone thinks they can do an interview. It is also difficult from a point of view because you produce a text that may seem very simple and ordinary to you, but the oral history text may be the only available text or audio about a topic in the future. The specificity of oral history makes the researcher need these resources and after referring, it becomes a historical text. Of course, oral history has been objected and criticized; that in oral history, stories and memories are produced, and this has caused many people not to rely on the outputs of oral history as a reliable text. However, oral history was compiled in a historical period with standards in the American Oral History Association. After that, citational and functional standards were developed in Europe and caused oral history to be accepted. As much as writing is a difficult task and it is result of your personal thought, and anyone can pick up a pen and write a text in his own name, oral history is easy compared to writing. From a point of view, it is a joint signature between the interviewer and the author, which has given an output under the title of oral history. You are all responsible for the content you produce. Oral history has three general stages: pre-interview—which has already been discussed—interview, adjustment and archive and compilation. If we want to describe position of the interview in oral history, the interview is a stage of oral history where all your identity, character, information and data come out of it. Also, all the efforts before the interview depend on the interview. We have many resources on interview standards. The book of the oral history conference in 2007 was focused on interview in oral history. Two books have been published by the NLAI. In addition to Persian, many foreign resources are available in the field of oral history interviews.

He further introduced the interview as a mutual conversation and added, “The standard interview in oral history is an active dialogue. In fact, oral history is an active conversation between two people about a topic that is formed through an agreement before conducting an interview. Of course, much of the work that is done in the field of oral history leans towards monologue. The subject, the interviewer and the interviewee also affect how much we move between a monologue or a dialogue in oral history. Nonetheless, according to my experience, the structure of the interview at first unconsciously leans towards the monologue and it is not strange at all. It is not easy for one to sit down, focus on the topic and questions, and face the interviewee. Especially if the interview is heavy or depending on the level of mastery of the interviewer or the mastery of the interviewee, sometimes it unconsciously leads to a monologue. Sometimes the interviewer dominates the interview so much that he/she even influences the interviewee and controls the interview too much; maybe the interviewee is in a framework where he/she does not speak, or does not have the desire to speak, or he/she doesn’t remind the information, or he/she has lost their memories and the interview goes astray. Sometimes the personality of the interviewee—such as military commanders or political figures—and his/her mastery of the subject causes the interview to turn into a monologue despite mastery of the interviewer. Sometimes the interviewer even does not have the courage to ask and the interviewee's words are not interrupted. Of course, sometimes the interviewee speaks so sweetly and charmingly that the interviewer may not want to interrupt his words.”

Referring to the border between oral history interviews and news interviews and psychology, Dr. Hasanabadi stated, “There are many who conduct oral history interviews in the form of news interviews or does not consider news interviews as oral history interviews. From another point of view, the interviews are divided into open, closed and mixed. Oral history interviews are question-based. That is, you have to extract a series of questions before starting the plan and include them as initial questions in the definition of the plan. These questions are usually decreased or increased in the initial interviews. In the first step, the official framework of the oral history is supposed to be organized and the data to be taken. But how you implement this framework in the interview and ask the questions is something else. Designing questions and the manner of questioning are important in moving the oral history towards a closed or open interview. Especially in the initial interviews, due to people's lack of mastery over the interview and the structure of oral history, sometimes it unconsciously tends towards closed interviews. If the questions are designed in such a way that the goal is to control the interview within a framework, it will generally end in yes, no or short answers. That the interviewee how to answer has also an effect in pushing the interview to the closed side. Sometimes the interviewee gets stressed and despite having good information, the interview unconsciously goes towards a closed interview. Sometimes the physical and mental condition of the narrator does not allow you to get the output as you want. Sometimes closed questions are needed in oral history. For example, to answer general questions, we want specific answers, and open questions are asked when either the interviewee has a high position, or he/she avoids answering, or he/she is so well-spoken that when you raise an issue, he/she unconsciously answers. That the oral history interview should be conducted with closed-ended or open-ended questions requires pathology. The fact is that both tastes and type of projects and personality of the interviewers are different. But the standard of oral history in the world is to use both types of interviews. That is, sometimes you should proceed with closed questions and when you need more description about the problem, use open questions.”

After explaining the types of individual and group interviews in oral history, Dr. Hasanabadi emphasized, “It is not a small task for a person to allow you to address his/her lived experience. Especially if he/she has a high prestige and position or does not want to talk. Some people do not like to retell and reread parts of their lives, and it is your skill as an interviewer to enter their personal world. In the first step of oral history, regardless of what kind of information you get from the narrator, you get personalized information of the person in all areas. Because over time, a person keeps his/her favorite things in mind, entrusts them to mental memory, and remembering them requires a good, intimate, and reliable relationship with the narrator. This will allow you to conduct a good interview, and a good interview requires that you establish good mutual communication. When the tape recorder goes off and the person talks to you, it's about a world of information they don't want society to know. However, he/she likes to share with you and this is one of the interviewer's skills. The third form of interview is the conversation of several interviewers with one interviewee to examine different political-economic dimensions. This type of interview is used for people who have a special position. But this interview eventually becomes completely official and news, it is located in a completely arid and formal framework, and from a perspective, the confidential and emotional aspect becomes weaker. In my opinion, formal interviews can sometimes be used, but I do not recommend this type of work.”

He continued, “Identity of oral history is interview, and the interview itself has components that, without it, the oral history interview will not be formed. The interview components in any oral history interview include interviewer, interviewee, instrument, topic and structure. Some people send questions and say answer them, record them yourself, and send them to us. Especially when the interviewee is not available. This type of work may give you data, but the interview is not an oral history one! This work is called oral memoriography. That is, what a person wants to write, he/she presents to you orally, and there is no more discussion, challenge, or conversation.”

Explaining the position and skill of interviewing, this oral history practitioner emphasized, “Can everyone do an interview? The answer is yes. Because maybe this is the only memory left of a person. Sometimes, we delay recording memories so much that we regret for a few minutes of recording memories. But this is the general view of the work of oral history. When we are going to start a targeted work and a specific plan, we need to extract reliable data. We have a series of general and personal standards and a series of specialized and scientific standards in the oral history interview. An interviewer must have several criteria: First, he/she must be patient; being patient in listening, asking questions, accompanying the interviewee, and in indexing information and compilation. In fact, patience is an important characteristic of an interviewer. People who are in a hurry and want to conduct the interview in several sessions are not good choices for oral history work. Listening well, sitting well, body language, eye-to-eye contact, and getting to know sensitivities of the interviewee are all your efforts in observing these points. Listen carefully to the moments when the narrator is immersed in the interview and is busy expressing the most important moment of his/her life. Be well dressed and neat. Sometimes, dress according to style of the interviewee. If you go to an interview in a suit, it delivers one message, and if you go in a t-shirt, another message. This issue is related to intellectual structure of the interviewee. The interviewer's understanding of the interviewee makes communication possible. The next characteristic of an oral history interviewer is that he/she must respect ethical and political considerations. If the person is not willing to answer questions about his/her personal life, don't put him in trouble with the type of questions. If you go for an interview as a representative of an organization, you will have different views and considerations. The next feature is lack of bias and prejudice, and it is very difficult to comply with this point. Because every human being has his/her own prejudices and sometimes these prejudices become a part of our personality; like nationalism. However, the important thing is that you should be ethically and professionally aware of how much these biases affect your interview. Because the interviewee should not feel biased by your questions and give him/her a bad feeling. The interviewer must also consider specialized features. He should be knowledgeable about topic of the interview and the interviewee. The questions should come from your knowledge of the subject. Each interview has several stages of questions. They are determined once during the project design. One step is the questions you go over and decrease or increase them with the interviewee. Another stage is questions come to your mind during the interview. 80% of the questions are result of the interviewer's knowledge and mastery of the subject. It is the interviewer who guides the conversation, takes considerations into account, verifies the narratives, and he/she is the one who must understand the truthfulness of the narratives. Because they are supposed to be a part of history.”

Dr. Abolfazl Hasanabadi said in the final part of his speech, “Some issues in oral history are key. Each interview is done only once and some people are not willing to talk about the same topic twice. If you don't ask questions good and knowledgeably in this one session, you have destroyed the interview. Study, see documents and photos before the interview. A knowledgeable interviewer guides appropriately the general framework of the oral history. We have several groups of interviewers. One group is free interviewers who work without organizational restrictions and regulations. But many times, they take the interview in a tasteful manner, ask for handy information and take the interview out of its own state and undermine it. Some interviewers are relied on organizations. That is, an organization pays and you do their oral history work and deliver the order. Each of these categories has its own criteria and position. But whatever type of interview you are, you must observe the aspects. The next question is that can anyone be interviewed? Just as the interviewer has a series of personal and public standards, the interviewee must also meet conditions. The interviewee must be healthy and even fresh. He should not be forgetful, and be eloquent and capable of presenting material. Of course, sometimes you have to choose people outside this framework. This condition is for when you are free to choose the narrator. No interviewee replaces another one. In oral history, we do not have repeated interviews. These books may have the same subject, but they do not have the same content. Because each interviewee narrates his own personal information about that subject.”

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