Storytelling as oral history: Revealing the changing experience of home heating in England

Abstract

Oral history provides a means of understanding heating behaviour through encouraging respondents to articulate the past in terms of stories. Unlike other qualitative methods, oral history foregrounds the ontology of personal experiences in a way that is well suited to revealing previously undocumented phenomena in the private world of the home. Three types of change may be distinguished: long term historical change, change associated with the life-cycle stage of the individual and sudden change. A sample of eight in-depth interviews is used to demonstrate the potential of oral history in the study of home heating. The themes to emerge from the interviews include early memories of the home, the financial struggle to heat the home, the influence of childhood experiences in adulthood and the association between warmth and comfort. For the future, domestic comfort, energy conservation and carbon reduction need to be reconciled with one another. Finally, a third type -and this is the interest here -comprises the personal stories of individuals that may be collected to create oral history.The aim is to provide a 'proof of concept' of oral history in energy research, that is to say a demonstration of its feasibility, validity and usefulness. The aim is, therefore, not just to demonstrate the methodology, but to show how oral history can be used to illuminate issues. Other researchers are, at present, using oral storytelling methods to illustrate and engage the public in histories of the use and exploitation of energy by local communities in the UK.1 'Coal fires, steel houses and the man in the moon', byDarby (2017), published in this same special edition, has a similar theme in revealing the story of a local experiences of energy transition. In addition, public engagement is a theme in large-scale storytelling exercises undertaken by the mass media, for example by the US National Public Radio 2 and the British Broadcasting Corporation.3 However, searches undertaken by the paper's authors have not identified any comparable study, in the UK or elsewhere, using storytelling and specifically the methods of oral history to investigate heating as an aspect of the history of the home.The paper is divided into three main sections:First: an explanation of the advantages and distinctiveness of oral history;Secondly, a review of the themes that might be expected to arise in the stories of respondents; andFinally an analysis of the accounts given by eight respondents. Why storytelling as oral history?Oral history is an extension of various qualitative and survey research methods that seek to capture previously undocumented phenomena in the private world of the house and home-a world that technologists, designers and energy researchers can struggle to access (Stevenson and Leaman, 2010

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“…The percentage of family members using a particular appliance was calculated based on the number of families who both own and use the item in question. 10 Usually light switches, plugs, and curtains, or appliances located above the kitchen counter (e.g. microwaves, kettles, toasters).…”

“…Adolescents generally seem to lose interest in energy topics [7,55], and are characterised by a particularly high level of electricity use [8,14,45,56]. Nonetheless, energy saving practices acquired during childhood remain crucial, because they re-emerge once teenagers grow into independent adults needing to manage their own household energy consumption and finances [7,10,16]. This highlights the importance of socialising children into saving energy at an early age.…”

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