Oldal 105 [105]
104] Digital Media and Storytelling in Higher Education
Trust between the researcher and the interviewee can only be established
through cooperation. Although the interview setting contains fixed content
nodes, the conversation can be flexible. The researcher and the interviewee
should act as equal partners in the research process, which helps to broaden
and deepen the topic in detail. However, the creation of collaborative
knowledge raises the issue of shared authority (Frisch, 1990, cf. Leavy, 2011).
Shared authority can be seen in data recording and in the interpretation of
events, and allows for the narrator to correct the researcher if the researcher
misinterprets a phenomenon. In oral history research, the subjects are not
referred to as the data provider or respondent, but rather the term narrator
or participant is used. These expressions refer to the nature of the research,
the role of the interviewer as the narrator-interpreter, and the collaborative
construction of knowledge. The researcher must take care to separate the
analysis of the researcher and that of the narrator when publishing research
findings (Leavy, 2011).
Positivist researchers criticize oral history researchers based on the bias and
lack of objectivity present in the research methodology. At the same time, oral
history videos and audio recordings are personal narratives that constitute a
data corpus accessible to any researcher for content analysis. By transcribing
and coding the narratives, certain content elements can be quantified and
typical patterns can be identified based on their frequency. However, text
analysis can also be complemented by observational metacommunication
analysis in oral history research, as the body language and prosody of the
interviewee can also provide additional information. Leavy (2011) argues that
the methodology of oral history research in the social sciences is strongly
based on the qualitative methodology of grounded theory, as data collection
and analysis leads to further data collection and analysis, eventually leading
to the development of theory from systematic data analysis. Mitev (2015)
argues that the advantage of grounded theory is that it allows the researcher
to approach social, context-dependent behaviors in a structured way, as it
systematically increases the sample in the process of data collection and
requires the constant interpretation and comparison of data. This approach
is relevant for the methodology of oral history research.
Researchers of personal narratives in the social sciences, especially in
sociology and history, situate individual micro-narratives in a broader socio¬
cultural and economic-political context. In cultural anthropology, comparative
culture studies and any field of the humanities with a historical-social research
orientation (e.g., theater history or dance history), oral history narratives
provide important sub-data for the reconstruction of a cultural construct.
The traditional form of oral history is narration through interviews within
the framework of organized research, recorded in audio or video format and
systematically stored in archives. Video technology and the emergence of
video-sharing portals have made it possible to record and share historical
testimonies: edited versions of in-depth interviews recorded about a historical