ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the environment during the Interview. Oral historians occasionally encounter an interviewee who is quite chatty but who clams up as soon as the recorder is turned on. Life interviews, in which the same person is interviewed multiple times in an effort to document that person's entire life or career, would generally include an opening focus statement as one way to help both interviewee and interviewer keep on track. The chapter suggests a variety of effective question-asking strategies, but interviewers should keep in mind two overarching ethical tenets. An oral history interview creates a new primary source of information about a specific time and place in the past either distant or recent. A conversational style is certainly better than an adversarial one but beware of falling into a conversational trap. It's also important to communicate new, unanticipated information to project coordinators because it may reflect an aspect of the topic.
