One of the most important parts of oral history is the interview itself. A good oral interview moves beyond just asking questions, it is largely about listening carefully to the interviewees, creating trust between you and them, and allowing them to speak about their experiences in their own words. Also, it is important to know that the way a historian asks questions, responds, and guides conversations can affect the kind of historical information that is gotten. Oral interview is a skill, and not having this skill will limit a historian's ability to gather accurate and meaningful information from the interviewees.
This means, oral interviews require preparation, and patience.
For this series, we will be referencing NHD National History Day teaching onguidelines for conducting oral interviewsand my personal Experience.
Before conducting an oral interview, you should know that you already have a topic you are researching on, a historical topic you want to study, and you need oral testimonies from people who witnessed or participated in that historical event so that they can give their own perspectives about what happened. You are actually doing this because you want to get diverse views on the topic. You may have already gone through written sources and probably carried out archival research on the subject, but you still want to hear directly from people who witnessed the event, because unlike other sources, these are firsthand materials. Historians construct the past through fragmented evidence gathered from different sources, and oral history, is one of those sources.