Living Voices: The Oral History Interview as Dialogue and Experience

Portelli, Alessandro

doi:10.1093/ohr/ohy030

Cited by 34 publications

(14 citation statements)

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“…However participants seemed enthusiastic about taking the opportunity presented by the interview to think about shifts in direction in attachment research in historical perspective. Indeed, as others have observed (e.g., Portelli, 2018), oral history is a methodology well suited to asking about the meanings participants give to the culture they have inherited, and the problems they and their community face in the present.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Inheriting Mary Ainsworth and the Strange Situation: Questions of Legacy, Authority, and Methodology for Contemporary Developmental Attachment Researchers

Spies

Duschinsky

2021

SAGE Open

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Mary Ainsworth’s legacy continues to shape the social and developmental sciences well after her death. The Ainsworth Strange Situation Procedure has, for decades, not only provided the underpinning methodology of attachment research, but also the frame of reference for theory. This has produced conditions where, as in psychoanalysis, debates about the future of the paradigm also entail a struggle to claim and negotiate the legacy of a founding figure. To date, historians have only looked at attachment research up to the 1980s. Interviews with 15 leading contemporary attachment researchers revealed Ainsworth’s importance to later research, but also laid bare the challenges of claiming her inheritance in responding to the current challenges facing this area of research.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Inheriting Mary Ainsworth and the Strange Situation: Questions of Legacy, Authority, and Methodology for Contemporary Developmental Attachment Researchers

Spies

Duschinsky

2021

SAGE Open

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“…Oral history is a research practice that should be understood as a dialogical discourse created by interviewees and interviewers in a specific space ‘both social and geographic: the distance, the difference, the otherness between the two partners involved’ (Portelli, 2018: 242). However, it reveals itself not only in the presence of an oral historian during an interview situation, but also in how the researcher presents this material later.…”

Section: From Research Practice To Defining the Story And Its Authormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…29–44), the result of which is an interview that is fairly a product of both the interviewee and interviewer. ‘In the interview, we are the co-authors, the cocreators of a document that, to some extent, is about us as well as about the persons we interview’ (Portelli, 2018: 247).…”

Section: From Research Practice To Defining the Story And Its Authormentioning

confidence: 99%

Together or apart? Doing biographical research and oral history in an interdisciplinary context

Gałęziowski

Kaźmierska

2022

Current Sociology

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This article compares research and analytical approaches with biographical materials in the fields of biographical research in sociology and oral history practised by a historian. The reflection is based on the experience of long-term cooperation between biographical sociologists and oral historians in the Polish research context. These contacts have created a space for the fruitful exchange of experiences in the field as well as for strengthening the researchers’ distinctiveness and disciplinary identity. It also makes it possible to identify various concerns, both mutual and individual, for each research field. The main objective of this article is to share perspectives, highlight the similarities and differences between the two disciplines, and to show concerns related to the practice of oral history and biographical research, especially those close to the boundaries between the two approaches when they use the same tool, that is, the autobiographical narrative interview. The first section of the article focuses on the specifics of each approach. It then describes the different results of the common research practice and their consequences in relation to anonymising, archiving and reanalysing the data. Ethical issues are embedded into the whole course of our argument.

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“…Oral history is "an art of a dialogue," says Alessandro Portelli (1997), and he calls an in-terview an experiment in equality (1991:29-44). It was predominantly he who wrote about the relational character of oral history, placing the meeting with another person in the center of this approach: "a dialogue and experience" and only then everything that results from this comes (Portelli 2018). 51 But, it is necessary to be aware that in some cases it is a responsibility of researcher to limit the interac- The issue of relationship between the researcher and the subject and its consequences has been one of the main topics of epistemological debates among oral historians since the 1980s and a key factor distinguishing oral history from other research approaches.…”

Section: Towards Subjectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Oral History and Biographical Method. Common Framework and Distinctions Resulting from Different Research Perspectives

Gałęziowski

2019

PSJ

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Reflections undertaken in this article are a direct result of the research into the fate of Children Born of War (CBOW) in Poland and relate to the methodological, epistemological and ethical tension experienced while working with the interview partners and analyzing their biographical accounts. The encountered difficulties became a root cause of the critical reflection and an impulse to an attempt to systematize the knowledge about the mutual relations of two research traditions: oral history and biographical method which have coexisted over the past few decades, interfering and penetrating each other to such an extent that many researchers began to equate them or consider one of them as a part of the other and vice versa. The chaos of terms and concepts was of great importance in this process. The text also presents similarities and differences of the two approaches both in an epistemological and ethical sense. The attitude towards the narrator, which is mainly the result of different scientific goals that researchers aim at in both research fields was recognized as the fundamental difference. However, underscoring the differences has no purpose of setting boundaries, but it is a postulate to be more careful and bear theoretical and methodological self-awareness of researchers, it is also meant to foster mutual learning and inspiration, which can positively affect the quality of research and analysis.

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Living Voices: The Oral History Interview as Dialogue and Experience

Cited by 34 publications

References 0 publications

Inheriting Mary Ainsworth and the Strange Situation: Questions of Legacy, Authority, and Methodology for Contemporary Developmental Attachment Researchers

Inheriting Mary Ainsworth and the Strange Situation: Questions of Legacy, Authority, and Methodology for Contemporary Developmental Attachment Researchers

Together or apart? Doing biographical research and oral history in an interdisciplinary context

Oral History and Biographical Method. Common Framework and Distinctions Resulting from Different Research Perspectives

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