Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research by Patricia Leavy (review)

Oral historians know that there is both an artfulness to our work and a technical craft that allows us to present our research to others. Many of us search for quality texts to help us teach those skills to our students. Patricia Leavy has provided us such a text with her book, Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research.

A sociologist by training, Leavy is a prolific author of a number of qualitative research methods texts (including Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice (2nd ed. [New York: Guilford Press, 2015]) and Essentials of Transdisciplinary Research: Using Problem-Centered Methodologies (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2011). She uses this experience in Oral History to cross disciplinary boundaries and bridge qualitative methods and oral history traditions, to the benefit of researchers in both realms. As an example, Leavy contrasts the practice of oral history interviewing with other interviewing techniques such as bibliographic narratives, in-depth interviews, and structured interviewing, both to demonstrate overlaps and to tease out the distinctiveness of oral history as methodology. She discusses what makes oral history historical and provides suggestions for ways in which researchers can capture holistic pictures of people’s experiences. Oral History, then, is a concise guide to the practice of oral history, with special attention to research design and writing.

The text begins with an overview of the field and practice of oral history. Leavy delves briefly into a discussion of the ontological foundations of research and how the assumptions that we make about the nature of reality have an impact on the research process. This is an important discussion because it signals a concurrent impact on research design that many new researchers have overlooked. Humans engage in meaning-making activities to make sense of events in their worlds; understanding the ontological underpinnings of these activities helps us to understand the meanings people assign to events.

In a chapter on research design, Leavy examines the various decisions made in the research process, with emphasis on those related to project design, data collection, and data analysis. In so doing, she notes the iterative process of research and explores how those iterations raise additional decisions for the researcher. She details the thinking-through of the process of research and includes questions for researchers to ask in the course of their own projects. She also includes discussion of the ethics of research and assurance of the protection of human subjects.

Throughout the text, Leavy offers practical advice and examples of both well-done and problematic research to illustrate her points. This includes excerpts of transcripts followed by discussion of ways to organize and analyze them. She also provides information about data coding and memoing and helpful checklists for researchers to use in refining their own projects.

One of the more challenging aspects of the process for newer researchers is the transition between fieldwork and the actual writing up of the findings. In my own experience, I tend to see more training for students in the areas of data collection and analysis, with less on writing up the results. This book helps to fill that gap. A unique contribution of this text is Leavy’s emphasis on how to produce high-quality writing. She includes detailed chapters on writing both the methods and the findings sections of research reports. In that discussion, Leavy also provides different approaches to representation of the work, with particular attention to analytic and impressionistic writing. Included also are recommendations on how to approach the details of academic writing that are often overlooked in methods texts, such as how to write an effective title, strategic use of keywords, and writing an abstract that is not simply a copy of a few paragraphs in the main text.

In the final chapter of the book, Leavy provides a framework for the evaluation of oral history research. In this section, she critically engages with the practices of oral historians. In writing about evaluation she includes information about how researchers can ensure...