Interviewing as Research Method into Environmental and Climate Justice
What is oral history?
The Oral History Association defines oral history as the process of “gathering, preserving, and interpreting the voices and memories of individuals, communities, and participants in past events.” While this definition effectively describes the methodology, oral history offers a richer and more nuanced exploration of intellectual and cultural contexts. Traditional historical methods often focus on significant events, political movements, or prominent figures, relying on official documents, government records, and published texts. In contrast, oral history emphasizes the narratives of everyday people, capturing their lived experiences to provide insight into the collective human condition.
Oral history connects individuals to historical events in a personal way. It weaves a rich tapestry where history is not just told but shared across different communities. This method emphasizes historical events through the perspectives of those who experienced them, helping the audience understand the diversity of human experiences.
What kinds of interviewing do social scientists do?
Social scientists have a unique methodological approach compared to oral historians in the aspect of interviewing. Unlike oral history, which focuses on experiences, memories, and ideas through narrations and conversations, social scientific interviews often aim to collect data for identifying social structures, such as how society functions and its patterns, and to understand social problems and phenomena. In social science, both narratives and numerical data can serve research purposes when supported by a sound research design. If researchers choose to conduct interviews to collect narrative data, they are engaging in qualitative research as opposed to quantitative research, which relies primarily on numerical data collected by questionnaire surveys. To ensure the reliability and validity of narrative data, social scientists often employ specific sampling techniques, such as snowball or quota sampling, and data collection methods, including structured interviews, which are conducted rigidly by design, and semi-structured interviews, which are more similar to an oral history approach.
Other than solely using interviews, social scientists can use interviews to help design questionnaire surveys or to supplement numerical data after surveys have been conducted. For example, researchers conduct interviews to understand participants’ perceptions before designing a questionnaire or to address gaps in the data after collecting quantitative information. In these ways, interviews serve both exploratory and complementary roles in social science research.
How does oral history compare to social scientific interviewing (similarities and differences)
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What can oral histories tell us about environmental and climate justice?
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What can [types of social scientific interviews] tell us about environmental and climate
Oral histories featured on this website.
Oral Histories (complete list)
How to do your own oral histories.
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