What are the strengths and weaknesses of oral history?

Answer 1

"To use oral history properly, the historian must understand its strengths and weaknesses. Good interviews provide background information, personal insights, or anecdotes rarely found in official documents. These contributions, together with oral history's ability to capture and preserve information that may not otherwise be saved, illustrate some benefits of the technique. Most of oral history's deficiencies are attributable to human faults.
Like all historical sources, interviews contain personal biases, but these biases may themselves constitute important data for the historian's consideration. Interviewees may also be unwilling to honestly discuss mistakes or errors even years after the fact. A potentially greater problem is the inability of some interviewees to provide accurate accounts because of the limitations of human memory. This is a special concern when recounting traumatic events or actions that took place years before. As time increases between an experience and its recounting, individuals tend to condense the sequence of events and omit critical actions and judgments. Although historians should consider the elapsed time when weighing oral history materials, a long duration does not automatically diminish the value of an interview. An individual who may not remember events that took place yesterday or last week often can recount in detail events that took place twenty or thirty years ago."

I found this information on this website;
http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/books/oral.htm

Check out this site too;
http://www.gcah.org/oral.html

Answer 2

One strength is group bonding. You can't have oral history without someone to pass it to. This helps to encourage time spent together (quality) and involved interactions.

One obvious weakness is the lack of "official" records. There's no paper trail with the spoken word.

Answer 3

if you have ever experienced oral history, it is more interesting. a person sitting in front of a circle of people can add more to the telling through his voice fluxuations and emotional input. the facial expressions also add a touch of interest to it. while on the other hand, adding on and sometimes a little twisting of the truth can add more interest, but takes the truth out of it. but then that even happens in written history, as im sure most of us have experienced.

Answer 4

Like all forms of conversations there is the possibility of the information getting distorted or altered along the way, that is one weakness. One strength is that it is the perfect way to pass on what has not been documented in books. Hope that helps...or gets your brain going.

Answer 5

The strenghts are that if all the written history gets destroyed, people will still be able to tell the stories, on the other hand if the people are wiped out their is no written history.

Answer 6

it's weaknesses are of course the chances of mistakes are higher than a written history....but the Griot (pronounced "gree owe") of east Africa (I forget which tribe, sorry) are taught from childhood the oral history of their people and they are very accurate; if you recall it was the Griot that provided Alex Hailey the final links in his family history when he wrote ROOTS.