Resources: Oral Testimony Interview Techniques

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What is Oral Testimony?

A tool for achieving sustainable development
Differences and advantages compared to the traditional interview & guidelines for collecting oral testimony
January 2000

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Introduction

Use of oral testimony in sustainable development

The voice of poor communities is seldom heard in the development debate. Why? Simply because this debate takes place mostly through written documents.

In order to change this, one should allow people to express themselves in a form that they know: orally. Through these testimonies, the wider society can be informed about what people say and think. Oral testimonies are a way of giving volume and power to the voices of people who are outside the main flows of communication.

If being poor means having less of a voice, then being the poorest of the poor means being the most silent of all. These individuals and groups tend to be "spoken for", sometimes by well-meaning governmental or non-governmental organisations. However, they can be misrepresented: problems and issues are often generalised, and the concerns of community leaders and elite are sometimes over-represented.

Individual testimonies are important touchstones against the generalisations of the "collective" version. The people themselves are placed best to formulate their own problems and defend their interests. As such the dissemination of testimonies gives society access to the views and experiences of more marginalised people. It can provide an information exchange forum, which can assist in the resolution of conflicts which polarise communities.

Themes and activities

This initiative of the Panos Institute aims to increase the knowledge and insight of the Haitian as well as Caribbean public about people's lives in Haitian communities. The objective is to give faces to various development issues and show impacts on individuals as well as the wider society. Five central themes are:

• HIV/AIDS. In collaboration with the Association for National Solidarity (ASON), testimonies will be collected of persons with HIV/AIDS to document the effects of the disease on their lives and on relations with family and friends. The testimonies will be used for prevention efforts. Additional interviews will be done with health service providers regarding their views on and experiences with relevant projects and strategies for solutions.
• Street children. The number of street children is growing rapidly, with now approximately 7,000 in Port-au-Prince and several hundreds in the provinces. Their plight and many related social justice issues to be documented include: modes of social and economic organisation, relations with child welfare centres, school and work, the police, health, prostitution, etc.
• Environmental management. Testimonies will be collected of farmers, fishermen and other users of the lands and natural resources, in order to document longer-term changes in the local environment. How have the changes influenced their lives? Which means do they envisage for slowing down the degradation of their environment? What do they think of the multiple projects already undertaken?
• Migrants and deportees. Caribbean people move for a variety of reasons. This has a profound effect on individuals, communities, family lives and the entire nations of the region. Testimonies will investigate social, economic as well as cultural factors.
• Women, "pillars for sustainable development". Haitian women play fundamental roles in society. In addition to their economic involvement, they are in charge of the well-being of the family and the education of their children. What are their aspirations, their views and their experiences? How does their participation influence the implementation of development projects?

In order to collect the testimonies, Panos searches support for:

• On-the-job training of interviewers in oral testimony collection. Training sessions will take place in the provinces as well as in Port-au-Prince.
• Production workshops where the interviewers use the collected testimonies to produce radio programmes, for use in Haitian national and community stations.
• Reproduction and dissemination of these radio programmes.
• Selection, adaptation, translation and editing of materials for distribution throughout the Caribbean region.
  

Preparation and training

Establishing topics for investigation and planning the interview

The themes to be documented (HIV/AIDS, Street children, Environment, Migrants and Women) are very diverse and large. There are many specific topics to investigate. During training of the interviewers, these topics should be identified. This could be done within the group, through considering the different worlds of potential interviewees: their social, economic, environmental and working contexts. Additionally, specialists as well as members of the community are to be consulted.

After exploring the wide variety of themes and topics, it is useful to distinguish the principal and secondary topics. This is important for knowing what priority to attach to each of these during the interviews.

Based on this exercise, an interview plan/questionnaire can be drawn up. This plan should be sensitive to how people in a community communicate with each other. It should be adapted as much as possible to their way of speaking (without falling into folkloric stereotypes!).

It is not useful to try to cover all topics in each interview. This would be confusing and the flow of information would suffer. In order to cover all important subjects, the interviewer should plan how to deal with them over a series of interviews.

Oral testimony interviews should be improvisational but guided encounters where the interviewee feels confident to freely narrate her or his own experience. The interviewer should keep an open mind and respond quickly to unexpected aspects for deepening the questions.

In this sense, the interview plan is not a list of specific questions, but rather groupings of topics to be covered. It is a "map" which shows where the interview should be going, and should prevent that it drifts aimlessly or loses direction when detours are taken.

Good questions are those which make sense to and animate the interviewee. They should orient the testimony, while giving plenty of space to the interviewee for free-talk and expressing ideas. Questions should also ensure that the key topics are covered and all leads, however unexpected, are followed through.

In order to establish a proper and relaxed atmosphere with different people, it is useful to decide on appropriate opening lines for the interview. The interviewer should think of polite formulae to show his or her interest in the interviewee: does he or she emphasize family, activities, etc?

The shortest questions are usually the best. The interviewer does not have to impress the narrator with his or her knowledge but should above all listen to what is said.

• Open questions should form the basis of the interview. These give the narrator scope to freely expand:
  • Can you tell me the story of what happened then?
  • How did you feel about that?
• Leading questions should be avoided. These tend to suggest specific answers:
  • Was that good?
  • Were you mistreated?
• Two questions in one should also be avoided, because usually only one answer will be given:
  • How do you make that and where did you learn how to?
• Precision questions will be necessary at various stages in the interview. These require short but exact factual information:
  • What was the name of that market?
  • What year took that place?
• Prompt and probe questions should be asked to encourage the interviewee to expand further in a certain direction or to go into greater detail:
  • Could you tell me more about that?
  • Could you explain exactly how that system works?

During training, each interviewer should conduct one or more practice interviews. Interviewers should work in pairs, where each has a chance to observe as well as conduct an interview. Practice is vital for appreciating the types of questions to pose, the need for follow-up questions and dangers of leading questions.

The practice interviews should be taped to facilitate discussion and comments by the group afterwards. This session allows also the interviewers to refine the themes to be explored and formulate and adjust the interview plan.

Preparing the community and selecting the interviewees

Before embarking on interviews, the interviewers and the trainer should visit an area where oral testimonies will be collected. They should explain the project to local community leaders as necessary and identify potential interviewees. Interviewees will not only be chosen based on their functions and responsibilities in the community, but also based on their capacity for clearly expressing themselves.

It is fundamental that the interviewees understand and agree with the way their testimonies will be used. It should equally be made clear that any requests for anonymity will be respected. An agreement should be reached for the most convenient timing of an interview (taking into account the availability of the interviewees, not of the interviewer!). Especially for women, it can be particularly difficult to set aside time without interruptions.

Interviewees should be varied as much as possible in age range, occupation, background, etc. They should have experiences and perspectives which are particularly illuminating. For example, most of the women interviewed for "Women: Pillars of Sustainable Development" should be in their own small enterprises, and be able to speak about their own experiences, perceptions and concerns. But it is useful to include some women who are organizers, who have extension responsibilities or represent organisations (business, informal or organised women's groups, community organisations, etc). These informants will be able to talk more broadly about women's situation and needs, and how people are trying to address these. These kind of interviews could provide important background within the series of radio programmes.

Street children te be interviewed should include those that live completely in the street, and those that return home, boys and girls, those born in the city and those originating from the provinces. Regarding migrants it is important to interview all types of people with migratory experiences, as well as criminal and other deportees.

Similar selection should be done regarding the "environment" and "HIV/AIDS" testimonies, with most interviewees being people directly involved with the land or marine resources, or people living with HIV/AIDS. For all topics, interviews with some community organizers, health service providers and extensionists will be vital for getting a broader picture.

Selecting individuals the interviewer knows already has important advantages. They will already have a degree of confidence in the interviewer and a good rapport will be easier to build. Further, the interviewer will be better able to select those who have interesting things to say, those who are open in talk and may enjoy being interviewed.

Methods of collecting

Tested ways to collect oral testimonies

• Life story interviews. The individual life story is the most wide-ranging interview form. These are normally private, one-to-one encounters between interviewer and narrator. It allows a person to narrate the story of his or her whole life in all its dimensions: personal, spiritual, social and economic. An average life story interview may need two or three sessions of several hours. Breaking up the interview in separate sessions gives people time to remember and explore the past, making recollection more a process than an occasion. Life story interviews often have a profound effect on the interviewee. They may never have told anyone their memories before and certainly have not recalled their whole life in the course of a few hours. For most people it is a positive experience, giving much satisfaction and a renewed sense of perspective.
• Focus group/community interviews. Sometimes a group gives a speaker confidence or generates a more lively and original discussion. It may also be useful to hear a consensus view of particular experiences or issues. Groups may set their own agenda for discussion, raising topics of most interest to them as a group: this can be a valuable insight in itself. Such sessions can also highlight discrepancies between individual and collective views of the same event.
• Single issue testimony. This type of interview seeks to gain testimony about a particular aspect of a subject or a person's life, such as:
  • Someone's working life,
  • Knowledge about environmental change,
  • Health situation in a community,
  • Conflicts (past or present) in the community, or
  • A period of food shortage.

Conducting the interviews

The scope of each interview should be restricted to a limited number of topics, in order to elicit detailed and personal responses and still keep interviews to an acceptable length (between one and two hours). However at the same time, an interviewer should be flexible and ready to respond to the unpredictable. He or she must use initiative and judgement to strike a balance between following the prepared questions and topics, and allowing someone who wants to talk about something different to do so, as long as it is relevant to the subject.

An interviewer him or herself must be interested in the subject of the research and must have enough understanding of it to see the significance of what is being said and pose appropriate questions to elicit further information. The quality of the collected information depends on this.

In order to conduct the interview smoothly, the key questions should be committed to memory. The interview plan should only serve as an aide-mémoire. It could be consulted towards the end of the interview, however care should still be taken not to intimidate the interviewee.

Difficult questions do not have to be answered: if a respondent is unwilling to talk about something, she or he should be encouraged but not forced.

Collecting oral testimonies is exhausting work. One needs alertness and enthusiasm at any time. Allow for not more than two interviews a day. Normally an interview lasts between one and two hours. However, with the time needed for introductions, rapport building, the finding of a suitable location, it will become much longer. If an interviewee still has a lot to say after two hours, a second interview should be arranged. More than two hours at a time is too long and too tiring for both interviewer and interviewee, and the quality of the material will suffer accordingly.

Recording the interviews

Oral testimony interviews are customarily tape-recorded. The presence of a tape recorder may be obtrusive to some degree and some people need time to grow accustomed to it. Also, some people may find tape recorders unacceptable, particularly when narrating certain events or very personal aspects of their lives. It is important to take this into account. The interviewer should switch off on demand during an interview when a particular sensitive subject is touched. To have control about "what is on the record" makes an interviewee feel confident about the process.

The type of equipment to be used depends on the purpose the tapes will have: if they will be broadcasted, or used in an educational or training setting, one should try to use professional-quality equipment with a separate microphone. If tapes only serve for transcription, then a recorder with build-in microphone is sufficient.

Elaboration

Presentation

The first outputs of this project will be a series of radio programmes. Secondly, we will prepare written materials. The outputs should be targeted to various audiences:

• The people and communities who testified. The radio programmes should be given back to those people whose testimonies this is and in whose interest it has been collected. In their communities, the material could be used for further discussion or reflection.
• The general public in Haiti. The radio programmes will also be disseminated widely across Haiti. In this way the materials will inform and possibly influence the general public, people from other walks of life and other situations then the interviewees, and the decision makers.
• The general public across the Caribbean. Written materials (booklet, press briefings and feature articles) will be distributed in various languages throughout the Caribbean.

The information in these outputs needs to be balanced and accurate. The main ingredients, the completed interviews, will be accompanied by relevant introductions and clarifications. These could convey the importance of the subject, the context in which the interview was obtained and additional social, cultural, historical or geographic background information. It is important to cite the sources where possible.

In a radio programme, oral testimonies can be presented in various ways, such as:

• A single life story (biography), giving detailed information about a range of issues from one individual perspective.
• A collection of testimonies, combined in one programme, giving different perspectives on a single issue.
• An argued interpretation of testimonies. Contrary to the former two, here the presenter takes the lead and uses fragments of testimonies to illustrate an issue.

It is most important to use the strengths of oral testimonies in the presentation. One should underline the fact that this information is not well-known, that the narrators share their reality of family lives and village lives. The presentation should also avoid generalisations in order to reveal the rich variety of human experience.

In the Caribbean there is quite some experience in dramatizing the oral testimonies (either single life stories or a collection) and present them as theatre. Also, mixed-media exhibitions have been mounted, using tape and video "highlights", display boards with transcribed excerpts, artefacts, slides and photographs, as well as life performances of storytelling, dance and song. Ideally, plays and shows as these should be devised by the relevant communities themselves.

Transcription

Generally, oral testimony interviews are transcribed in their totality. This facilitates the use of the materials in the future, possibly in other formats.

On average it takes five to ten minutes to transcribe every one minute of speech. It requires time and concentration, and, when it is impossible to work off an electricity supply, a lot of batteries.

When transcribing, it is essential to maintain a very high standard. Therefore, it should be done only by the interviewer him/herself. It is likely that other people will be less efficient and may introduce errors.

Transcription needs to be as accurate (near verbatim) as possible. A summary of what was said will not be acceptable, because the testimony will lose its colour, individuality and "oral" character. The way people speak, with hesitation, repetition, exclamation, emphasis and dialect, should not be lost.

Only after transcribing, some minor editing may be useful: some repeat can be eliminated, events can be put in the right order, and the references to one topic could be brought together. In this way, the interview can be made more coherent and readable.

Translation and adaptation of materials

After the production of oral testimonies is finished in Haiti, we will translate some material for use in the region. The translation should seek to be as accurate as possible in meaning and style. Metaphors, proverbs and other words or phrases which are not easily translatable should be translated literally at first, even if they do not seem appropriate in that way in another language. Where necessary, an explanation of the meaning can be added in parenthesis. It is very important not to loose the local character of the language.

Some initiatives in the Caribbean region

Memory Bank (Jamaica)

"An old man dies ... a book is lost!"

Much of the cultural heritage of the Caribbean is unrecorded, particularly the African. The Jamaica Memory Bank was established in 1981, in order to document the country's heritage "by tapping the memories of our Senior Citizens so that their knowledge can be available for posterity". It was the initiative of a small group of people, whose work in social sciences and documentation of folk music had alerted them to the rate at which Jamaica's traditional knowledge and culture were disappearing. The Memory Bank was soon supported by a large island-wide team, and by 1984 the project had inspired a regional seminar. This resulted in the setting up of a network of memory banks in several countries of the Caribbean.

A key factor in the decline of traditional culture and history is the increasing influence of mass media, especially from North America. Also, many Caribbean people descend from African slaves, who were actively discouraged from continuing their cultural practices. The descendants of Indian plantation workers, who had more cultural freedom, have retained a stronger sense of identity and history. The Jamaican Memory bank has therefore focused particularly on the Afro-Caribbean heritage.

Interviewing is carried out by volunteers, who are trained by a team of professional researchers. The materials collected include tape-recorded interviews, videos, artefacts, photographs and manuscripts. The interviews range from single-topic discussions to whole life stories. By the early 1990s the project started to actively involve more elderly people in the running of the project. It was found that elder interviewing elder would generate easier conversation and more informative material.

By now, many elderly Jamaicans have been interviewed, mostly over 80 years old. In addition, many songs have been taped, and ceremonies, celebrations and such have been photographed, taped or filmed. The material is carefully documented, indexed, classified and analysed on information it contains, for example cultural, practical, scientific, botanical, linguistic or medical.

While the Memory Bank has a clear archival role, it also has an important developmental function. As the pace of change increases and the economic influence of North America becomes even more difficult to resist, it is felt that a stronger sense of Caribbean history will help the region define and pursue its own course of development.

Folk Research Centre (St. Lucia)

"Culture for development"

The oral testimony project of the Folk Research Centre ("Plas Wichech Foklo") of St. Lucia is based on the concept of the Jamaican Memory Bank. However, in addition to documenting and promoting cultural resources and preserving the past, the Centre analyses these for their relevance to modern development strategies. This reflects a strong feeling that current development action is ignoring or even impoverishing many sections of the community and that alternative methods and forms of social organisations are needed.

The Centre trains and employs elders to collect life stories and local knowledge and then makes "culture-kits" for schools, which can be used in a variety of cross-curriculum activities. Interviewers are introduced to the history of St. Lucia, in particular the Kwéyòl culture, and are familiarised with Kwéyòl forms of expression, especially the way people tend to define time and the significance of certain recurrent phrases.

The Centre aims to feed collected information back into as wide a cross section of the community as possible, to solicit their response and suggestions. This is being done through community workshops, which include a photo exhibition, slide presentation, a formal presentation in Kwéyòl, followed by theatre based on stories collected. Subsequently people have a chance to respond and comment and join various activities run by local cultural groups.

"Women and Conflict" (El Salvador and Nicaragua)

"Was it worth it?"

While the impacts of armed conflict the world over have a shocking familiarity - death, disability, rape, displacement, family separation and economic and environmental destruction - women's experiences are not uniform. In 1993, the Panos Institute started a global oral testimony project on "Women and War". In two years, this project collected more than 200 testimonies from 12 countries and as many languages. Women from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Tigré (Ethiopia), Uganda, Somaliland, Liberia, Sri Lanka, India, Vietnam, Lebanon, Bosnia and Croatia revealed their views and experiences as fighters, participants, refugees, victims caught between warring factions, organisers for peace and rehabilitation, relatives and partners of the dead and disappeared. They talked about psychological and physical damage of the war and the battle for economic survival.

In order to collect the interviews, Panos either worked with existing women's groups, or a team was put together with interviewers from different organisations and interests. Partners were not only interested in the information, but also in learning from the process of collection. Training workshops were organised to discuss and develop the themes on which to focus. However, the techniques and value of oral testimony collection were explored also.

In Central America, the interviewers found that the collected oral testimonies were very important for further use in awareness, reflection and reconciliation initiatives. Therefore, activities were continued after the first Panos project came to an end. In 1996, the group in El Salvador produced a book specifically for their country. It was widely disseminated and also used in a number of seminars and workshops.

The Salvadorean book, entitled "¡¿Valió La Pena?!" highlights the continuing impacts of the past conflict, and the possibilities and necessities for social change now and in the future. A specific workshop for the interviewed women provided an opportunity for self-evaluation of the testimonies two years after they were collected. Other workshops gathered representatives of organisations and institutions in various parts of the country, which analysed the impact of the testimonies, and helped to design specific strategies for development and reconciliation.

The Panos Institute has been working on oral testimony collection since the late 1980s. This programme has its origins in the Sahel region of Africa, where Panos in collaboration with SOS Sahel (U.K.) did interviews with over 500 mostly elderly people. The perceptions and recollections of these farmers and fishermen, nomads and pastoralists from eight countries were documented to learn about the changing natural, social and economic environment in which they live. Subsequently Panos published a source book on the subject, both a practical guide and an introduction to the collection and use of oral testimony in development.