Article

Case Study: Interviewing about Difficult Topics

Introduction

On several occasions staff at parks that deal with difficult or sensitive topics have sought advice while planning oral history projects. How do we prepare for interviews that are about traumatic events and might evoke painful memories?

Response

As the National Park Service adds sites that commemorate people and events within living memory, oral history interviews can contribute to research, interpretation, and resource management. Many of these sites deal with difficult subjects -- Japanese American incarceration during World War II; movements for civil rights and social justice; the dangers of work; and the consequences of war. Even during oral history interviews with long-time NPS personnel, narrators might choke back tears as they describe search and rescue and recovery missions; deep friendships developed over the course of a career; injustices experienced; and core beliefs to which they held firm. How do oral historians conduct interviews with people who may have experienced trauma or lived through difficult circumstances or display strong emotions as they recall the past?

Oral history practitioners throughout the world and within the National Park Service have contemplated that question and offer guidance.

As you prepare to conduct interviews about difficult topics:

  • Good training and planning are more important than ever. Interviewers must be well trained, experienced, knowledgeable about the topic, and empathetic with people who display deep emotion.

  • Build in more time than usual for all steps of the process. For example, you may devote more time to pre-interviewing in order to build trust and rapport. It may be easier for a narrator to discuss a difficult subject if you schedule multiple short interview sessions rather than long sessions. Expressing gratitude for the interview is especially important.

  • Anticipate that narrators might share emotions and briefly lose their composure; reflect on how you will give them respectful time to recover with dignity.

  • Listening to stories about difficult subjects can be draining; allow time for interviewers to recover from the interviews and share their experiences.

  • Realize that oral history is not therapy, and you are not a therapist.

Interviewers who deal with difficult subjects:

  • Prepare themselves to exhibit, as one oral history practitioner puts it, a “greater degree of both sensitivity and sturdiness than is normally brought to a life review.”

  • Demonstrate empathy but not excessive emotion.

  • Put ethics at the heart of oral history relationships.

  • Listen without judgment.

  • Acknowledge the narrator’s distress and apologize for stumbling into a topic that was painful; determine if the narrator wants to continue.

  • Are comfortable with silences.

  • Know when to stop.

  • Realize that not all people who experienced difficult events feel that they are victims, and not all will have trouble telling their stories.

  • Develop a way to deal with the difficult stories that they are hearing.

Putting this fundamental guidance into practice requires self-awareness, empathy, the ability to read the situation during an interview and to adjust, and the grace to learn from missteps. When the Park History Program sponsored a webinar about conducting difficult interviews in 2019, we asked several NPS oral history practitioners to share their experiences.

Interviewing at Manzanar National Historic Site, Part I

Responses from Rosemary Masters, Interpretive Ranger, Manzanar National Historic Site

Where do you work? Who have you interviewed to inform research, management, and interpretation about your site?

Genie Obana is seated in front of a video camera, looking at papers with a kneeling woman in NPS uniform
Rosemary Masters prepares to interview Genie Obana at Manzanar National Historic Site.

NPS

I work at Manzanar National Historic Site in California, where I run the site’s oral history program. Manzanar was the first of ten camps in which the US government unconstitutionally incarcerated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

I’ve interviewed many Japanese Americans, now in their 80s and 90s, about their WWII personal and family history. Most were incarcerated in camps like Manzanar, though there are a number of outliers, like a Japanese American woman from Oxnard, CA who was living in Hiroshima, Japan, when the United States detonated the atomic bomb over the city.

I’ve also interviewed a Chinese American man who was incarcerated in Manzanar with his Japanese American wife, and who later served in the US military and participated in the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany.

I’ve interviewed people who spent World War II in Manzanar because their parents worked for the government as War Relocation Authority staff members, as well as one woman who taught Latin in the Manzanar High School.

I’ve interviewed people who are locals to the Owens Valley, where Manzanar is situated, and whose family stories help teach the rich history of this region.

What about the people you interview and the topics you explore can create difficult conversations? Difficult in what ways?

This could be a very long answer, so I’ll keep it brief here.

I have never done an interview in which the conversation has not had the potential to be “difficult.” Most people we interview here at Manzanar suffered a great deal of psychological trauma, and sometimes physical trauma, because of the racist actions of their own government. While those imprisoned in camps like Manzanar obviously overlap on some facets of their history – i.e. being detained behind barbed wire and patrolled by armed military police despite having been charged with no crime – there were innumerable variables which impacted each individual’s unique experience of this incarceration. For some people, talking about their WWII history or other parts of their lives can be extremely emotional. Some have never spoken of their experiences to their family members; I’ve often learned, usually after the interview, that I’m the first person with whom they’ve shared these stories. Talking about any kind of trauma is very hard but having held these stories and feelings inside for three-quarters of a century can make the conversation even more difficult.

People of varying ages stand in a line in a dirt area outside a building at midday
Mess line, noon, Manzanar Relocation Center in California (1943).

Photograph by Ansel Adams. Library of Congress.

Can you give one or two examples of an interview in which the narrator (and perhaps you) felt strong emotions, discomfort over subjects being discussed?

I have a lot of examples here. I’ll attach an excerpt of an interview which was very good, and which fits into this category. Another, which is quite pertinent, would take me a very long time to type up in detail. I’ll try to explain it briefly below.

The most important thing we do at Manzanar to prepare for difficult conversations, or even just the possibility of particularly difficult moments within an interview, is to spend a great deal of time well before the interview takes place getting to know the narrator, helping that person gain a clear understanding of what an oral history entails, and helping the narrator feel comfortable speaking with us. One time when this did not happen (the narrator’s nephew wanted to be the go-between pre-interview), the narrator did not get a clear understanding of what we would be discussing. Furthermore, unbeknownst to me, the narrator and his nephew did not have a particularly open relationship – yet the nephew was in the room for the interview. When we reached the point in the narrator’s story in which some particularly difficult things had happened to his family, it turned out his nephew did not know about any of it, placing the narrator in an extremely uncomfortable situation. Ultimately, he asked not to continue the interview. This was an important lesson for me.

How did you handle the situation?

It is the narrator’s absolute right, at any point, to stop the recording or even to stop the whole interview if he or she wishes. I honored that right.

But I felt horrible that I had unwittingly placed him in such an uncomfortable situation. I spoke with him privately later, apologized, and offered the possibility to continue the interview if he ever desires to do so. We stay in regular contact and have developed a very positive relationship. He and his wife even came all the way to Manzanar to spend the day here, getting a tour from me (though, really, I got the tour from them!). Though he has happily provided feedback on his interview transcript and has been glad to have the recordings of his partial oral history, he has not yet wished to finish the interview, and he may never do so. I am ok with that. What is far more important to me is that he feel appreciated for sharing however much of his story he wishes to share and feels respected by those of us at Manzanar NHS – and I know he does.

This is my most extreme case, and the only time I’ve ever had to stop an interview because of content (and audience). In many, many other instances, narrators have become emotional during the interview. Beforehand, I always let the narrator know he or she can request we stop the recording if he or she would like to state something off the record. This is the case, too, if someone would like us to stop the recording because they are, for example, crying. Often, people don’t wish to stop the recording. In these instances, there is nothing more important than showing empathy and compassion and understanding for the narrator – more commonly this is through expressions than through words. But -- that the narrator knows you are compassionate, understanding, non-judgmental, etc. stands upon the foundation of all the work done before the interview, and trust in the work you will continue to do after the interview.

In hindsight, is there anything you would do differently?

In the case of the nephew fiasco, I learned very clearly that speaking directly to the narrator about his expectations and my expectations regarding the interview (and much more) and making sure we are both on the same page, is an absolute necessity. It is not ok to use a go-between for these important, pre-interview conversations.

Hank Umemoto

Below is an example of difficult, emotional subject matter in Manzanar’s oral histories.  This excerpt has been edited and is not a verbatim transcription of the recording. 

Content warning: Please be aware, the narrator swears, and uses a racial slur, which was frequently used against Japanese Americans during WWII, numerous times in the following excerpt.

Interviewing Military Veterans

Responses from Eleanor Mahoney, a former Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow and former Mellon Humanities Fellowship National Coordinator for the National Park Service.

Where do you work? Who have you interviewed to inform research, management and interpretation about your site?

I work in Washington, DC, as a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Labor and Productivity. I have participated in a variety of oral history projects, including interviewing military veterans, men who enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps, men and women who worked in fire tower lookouts, retired municipal judges, and public and nonprofit employees involved with conservation initiatives in the 1970s.

In the Shrine Room at the USS Arizona Memorial, a large wall lists the names of the Arizona’s dead. A person in uniform stands facing the walll, holding a folded American flag.
The Shrine Room at the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor National Memorial.

NPS

What about the people you interview and the topics you explore can create difficult conversations? Difficult in what ways?

I have interviewed U.S. military veterans, especially men (most women I interviewed were from a later period) who served in in World War II and the Vietnam War. Most of the men I interviewed were in combat. These individuals not only experienced the loss of close friends or were injured, they themselves also engaged in violence as part of being in the military. Some flew airplanes that dropped bombs, while others fired weapons at opposing forces. The feelings and emotions associated with these actions often have been repressed or bottled-up for many years. I believe only one of my interviewees ever sought support from a mental health professional though a significant number did, in fact, mention struggling with the emotions. Substance abuse as a coping mechanism was mentioned, as was anger towards loved ones.

I have never served in the military. I have never witnessed the type of violence that these men experienced. I am also not trained in addressing trauma and its effects. Yet, during the interviews, some men cried. Others remained quite stoic, despite the topics being addressed. Our interviews almost always dealt with death and violence – though those subjects were far from the only topics covered. Deciding how and if to elicit more information on one of these subjects is very, very difficult.

I would also like to note my positionality as a young, college-educated woman interviewing older male veterans, many of whom had never been to college (it is important to note that in the region I was living in, college attendance is not at all the norm). Social class differences/ economic privilege did not create tensions per se (having family from West Virginia gave me some legitimacy in the eyes of interviewees), so much as imbuing me with an aura of “knowledge” that I, in fact, did not possess. In addition, given our age differences, I was, at times, treated as a grand-daughter – I think some of the men wanted to shield me from the more upsetting aspects of their stories.

A man in coveralls stands on an airfield in front of a small plane
A World War II Air Force Master Sergeant stationed what is now part of the Aleutian World War II National Historic Area.

Image from Walter Dalegowski / NPS

Can you give one or two examples of an interview in which the narrator (and perhaps you) felt strong emotions, discomfort over subjects being discussed?

One of the narrators was in the 101st Airborne Division and landed at D-Day, June 6, 1944. While he had a modest pride over his participation (the narrator was a very humble though amazing man), the memories of that experience, including the deaths of so many people he knew, remained potent. It had been almost sixty years, but all the details were vivid. Hearing his story and seeing how he was upset was quite an emotional experience.

How did you handle the situation?

In that case, I gave the narrator time and opportunity to continue. I did not ask many follow-up questions even though from a “history” perspective, I could have gotten more information about D-Day itself, which would have been significant. At that moment, his emotional well-being was far more important. When dealing with a topic like war, death, violence, trauma, and so on, so often an interviewer’s personal relationship and credibility with a narrator matter.

In hindsight is there anything you would do differently?

I actually did more interviews with this individual related to other non-military aspects of his amazing life and additional details emerged during these sessions. I think having more time to spend with an interviewee as well as the potential for multiple interviews / sessions would be helpful. I have also considered exploring different formats – i.e., an interview done by myself (the “historian”) and then maybe an interview done by a friend, even from the military – think of the Story Corps interviews that NPR sometimes airs. More time spent with his physical memories, photos, of course, but also other relics from his service might have been helpful.

I would also like to take a course on trauma and storytelling / autobiography and psychology. I am not a trained mental health professional, but I am probing very painful areas. I need to know the ethics and best practices of this type of interviewing in more detail from professionals beyond historians.

Interviewing at Manzanar National Historic Site, Part II

Responses from Alisa Lynch, Team Lead for Interpretation & Visitor Services (Supervisory Park Ranger), Manzanar National Historic Site

Where do you work? Who have you interviewed to inform research, management and interpretation about your site?

I have conducted 73 of Manzanar’s 600+ interviews. Most of those interviews have been with Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during World War II, with additional interviews with camp staff families, local residents, and a few departing NPS employees.

Two women hold phones to their ears in a museum exhibit inside a barracks
Maruki sisters listen to their oral history in the Barracks exhibit at Manzanar National Historic Site.

NPS

What about the people you interview and the topics you explore can create difficult conversations? Difficult in what ways?

The whole topic of incarceration is difficult, complex, and emotional. Some of the most difficult situations are asking about painful or humiliating times. For one interviewee that was being intentionally shot by a military policeman who later bragged about “shooting himself a J@p” in local bars. For others it’s about death of family members, disintegration of their families, and/or the humiliation of enduring private moments in public spaces.

Other difficult interviews are when I know more than the interviewee about aspects of their past. For instance, an orphan in Manzanar had never seen historic correspondence from her birth mother saying she didn’t want the child or to ever be contacted about her again. It’s a difficult conversation when you’re introducing painful information into someone’s life. But it is not up to me to decide they shouldn’t see it.

A similar situation came up with another woman who was orphaned as a child because her father murdered her mother and then committed suicide in their barracks. She was four and her sister was six when they were sent to the orphanage. She was not aware of the background of her parents’ case and the existence of a copy of her father’s diary which accuses her mother of infidelity, as well as witness statements of others commenting on their marriage problems. She was eager for the information; her sister was angry to know that it existed and was in the NPS reference files.

Can you give one or two examples of an interview in which the narrator (and perhaps you) felt strong emotions, discomfort over subjects being discussed?

The stories of the man who was shot (Hikoji Takeuchi) and the orphans (Annie Shiroishi Sakamoto and Sharon Okazaki Kodama). Those were some of the hardest.

How did you handle the situation?

To try to be as compassionate and empathetic as I can be, but also objective and honest.

In hindsight is there anything you would do differently?

Each interview is different. The times when I have felt my interview skills were lacking occurred because I had not personally done sufficient research on the person and their experiences. There is no substitute for up-front preparation. The other thing I wish we could do—but is logistically and financially difficult—is to be able to devote a full day to each interviewee. Often, they want more time than we can spend when scheduling two interviews per day. People open themselves up to talk about personal and painful memories. Often, they want to share a meal. But, because most of our interviews are hundreds of miles away and because our travel budget and schedules are tight, we typically schedule two per day. It’s a long day for the interviewers, yet it feels like a short time with each interviewee.

Back to Interviewing: Case Studies

Last updated: October 25, 2023