Human Values in Oral History

Abstract

It is a curious paradox that whereas many historians view oral history as a way for professionals to amass information, sociologists have seen oral and life history as a way to oppose and provide alternatives to the dehumanizing effects of data collection in survey research, as well as in related forms of positivism, materialism, behaviorism, and atomism. For those sociologists, oral history has been a means to open up sociology to nonprofessionals, to involve them and make sociology accessible to them, not merely to get information from them. The discipline of history is usually considered at least partly in the humanities, while sociology is a social science; but oral histories in history often seem mere instruments for collecting data, while oral histories have played a more autonomous role in humanistic sociology, humanistic criminology, and humanistic psychology. These have tried to restore human traits to research subjects depersonalized by other sociological and psychological methods. They have also tried to open up social science both to research subjects, so as to represent their viewpoints, and to lay readers of sociology, often to attract their