1. By:
Trevor Lummis
Structure and Validity in Oral
Evidence

2. Trevor Lummis
 an English writer and historian.
 a past Honorary Treasurer of the Oral History
Society and held an Honorary Fellowship in the
Department of Sociology at the University of
Essex.
 a historical consultant to the The Bounty
Hunters, a television documentary on the work
of a team from James Cook University,
Queensland, which was diving on the wreck of
HMS Bounty and doing other archaeological

3.  At the University of Essex his research work
has been in social history through oral
history methods.
 After working as research assistant on
Family Life and Work Experience before
1918, he was senior research officer on The
Family and Community Life of East
Anglican Fishermen (Social Science
Research Council grant HR 2656/1), which
focused in particular on the working
environment and its effect on industrial and

4. His works:

5. Validation of Oral Evidence
The historical
experience
Individual experience
is typical of its time
and place

6. Individual
Interview
Aggregation
and
Tabulation
Ways to Assess Validity

7. The Individual Interview
 The main concern for oral history is
the degree to which the accurate
recall of the past is possible.
 It is known that that when memory
fails it is the most recent memories
which go first, while early memories
remain clear or are even enhanced.

8. MEMORY
RECALL
Fund of information about the
past that an informant will
readily relate which are liable to
be integrated with subsequent
experience and values.
Responses to detailed
interviewing which prompts
dormant ‘memories’ that are
less likely to be integrated into
the individual’s present value
structure.

9.  It is a mistake to discuss interviews as if they
are a standard product, since some areas
are more difficult to recapture than
others.
 The validity of an interview can be assessed
for its general accuracy by the degree to
which it corresponds to checkable details.
 Person’s interpretation of events can be
affected by the physiological and social
process of aging (Paul Thompson).

10. Nevertheless, if careful reading
and cross-checking can, in most
cases, establish the validity of
much of the detail in interviews,
it does not solve the problem of
omission and suppression.

11. Ron Grele
 Raises the interesting aspect of the
use/interpretation that the historian wants to
make of an interview.
 The methodology used to understand and
validate an interview will be intimately
connected to the underlying historical
assumptions: it will likewise shape the nature
of the history emerging from it.
 Interpreting interviews in terms of individual

12. Conclusion:
 It may be that (for the present at least) there
is no entirely satisfactory method of validating
individual interviews.
 The more aware of history and politics an
informant is, the more likely is the danger of
his rationalising an account of the past to
harmonize with a present view point.
 The virtue of drawing on a number of
interviews is that they provide some basis for

13. Aggregation and
Tabulation
 As this procedure has been criticised for
being ‘positivistic’, it should be stated that
the method is not tied to any specific
epistemology.
 The possibility of understanding the structure
and consciousness of individual interviews
through their comparative structure is,
however, only one of two dimensions of
validity. The other is the degree to which an
interview, or group of interviews, might be

14.  Tabulation can provide a means of
assessing how representative are a group
of interviews, by revealing the level of
internal consistency and by demonstrating
the degree of conformity to the broader
historical picture known from other
sources.
 Structuring the evidence not only provided
some grounds for generalising the
evidence in the interviews, but actually
contributed to a more accurate

15. Thank You!
Presented by:
Mr. Mervin Ajose Espinola
MAE-Social Studies