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ORAL HISTORY IN THE UKRAINIAN COMMUNITY b y a n i s a h a n d z i a s a w y c k y j 3. Conducting an oral history interview Continuation Let us assume you have already chosen a person with whom you wish to conduct an oral history interview, made arrangements for the first meeting, and done all necessary background research. You are now wondering how the interview itself will go. You are probably asking yourself ’’What interviewing techniques shall I use!” or "How shall I make the best possible use of the opportunity to interview my oral author?” The qualities that should characterize your approach to the interview are informality, good listening and sensitivity. Let us take a look at each of these qualities. An informal approach puts both you, and most importantly, your oral author at ease. Ask your oral author to choose a place for the interview that he/she finds most comfortable, be it a living room, office, or front porch. Don’t walk into the house with your tape recorder in hand, ready to spring into action. Relax, chat about the weather, the decor, anything. If you’re interviewing someone with a tight schedule, of course, you will have to cut down on the small talk, but even then some small talk is important. (Try to remember some speeches you have heard that d id n ’t begin with a joke!) Another quality that makes for the success of the interview is that much overworked expression "being a good listener.” Keep in mind that your purpose is to gather information from your interviewee n o t to hear yourself talk. Ask an open-ended question and then let your oral author take it from there. You would be surprised how even very shy and quiet folks open up when the memories begin to flow. Your job is to stimulate those memories and record them. This often requires a certain amount of sensitivity in the timing or wording of certain questions. For example, you might want to know how many years of schooling your oral author had. Rather than hitting him/her over the head with "You only •got as far as the 4th grade, right!”, it is much better to ask the interviewee to talk about his/her childhood and school years. In this way, you will get all the information you need, including the context for that information, plus the author's appreciation for your approach. Another possibility is to leave sensitive or potentially embarrassing questions for the later stages of the interview, when the interviewee has warmed up to you and to the idea of being interviewed. You should have a framework for all your questions, and indeed you might want to have a list of questions to refer to. However, be flexible. Your oral author might go off on a tangent answering one of your questions, but may in the process provide you with information and reminiscences that you didn’t know he/she had. It wouldn’t be wise to cut off the interviewee’s remarks just to get on with your list of questions! Avoid dead-end questions, like ’’How old were you when you emigrated?” wich only requires a response like "Twenty” or ’’Forty-one.” Ask rather ’’What were the events which led you to emigrate?” When your oral author answers questions, always seek examples and anecdotes. The outline of people’s lives is basically the same. It’s the details and unusual experiences that distinguish one person from the next. Be sure you pick up those details in your interview. One possible technique to employ in encouraging anecdotes, stimulating memories and ensuring a smooth flow researcher as one who does not suffer from a feminist bias, to say nothing more. A sample group of female college students was asked to rate a number of professional articles from 6 different fields.The articles were collated into 2 sets of booklets and the names of authors were changed so that an identical article was attributed to a male author — for example, John T. McKay — in one set of booklets and to a female author — for example, Joan T. McKay — in the second set. Each student was asked to rate the articles in her booklet for value, competence, persuasiveness and writing style. As Goldberg has predicted, the identical article received significantly lower ratings when the reader assumed its author was a woman. While he had an ticipated this result for the articles from professional fields generally considered the province of men, much to his surprise Goldberg’s respondents also downgraded articles from the fields of dietetics and elementary education when they were attributed to female authors. When the same experiment was repeated by other researchers using both male and female subjects, it was found that males show the same implicit prejudice against women as do females. Goldberg’s experiment ultimately proved that the majority of people, regardless of sex, immediately assume that professional men are better than wo men simply because they are men. • In 1969 Matina S. Horner’s now notorious study "Fail, Bright Women” was published in P s y c h o lo g y T oday. The experiment was conducted to measure the level of conflict women felt about success and failure. The study required a group of college women to complete the following story: ’’After first-term finals, Anne finds herself at the top of her medical school class." The women who participated in the study all had high intellectual ability and histories of academic success; they were the very women who could expect to have successful careers. Yet, over 2/3’s of their stories revealed a clear-cut inability to cope with the concept of a carrer-oriented woman. They described Anne as being lonely, unhappy, unattractive and unsure of her ’’femininity;” Her achievement was seen as causing her to drop out of school to marry the male student who took her place as number one in the least severe cases and as precipitating her nervous breakdown, social ostracism and suicide in the most extreme instances. Of the remaining stories, half of the respondents presented Anne as going on to become a doctor; throughout the descriptions, the students felt the need to reiterate over and over that, despite her career, Anne was ’’still a woman” and that she was "really feminine.” A signi ficant portion of the stories, the final 1/6 of the sample, showed that the students could not face the question of success head on. Respondents wrote that Anne was not a real person, but the creation of several male students who were playing a joke on ’’women's libbers”; some wrote that Anne’s being in first place was just a mistake made by computers, much to her relief; others wrote that Anne was destined to become a very fine NURSE. These same students also wrote essays about John who was first in his class. His stories read like dreams come true. 22 НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ, ЛЮТИЙ 1978 Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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