I don't know what, maybe to Cole
[inaudible] California.
I think we have a wedding coming in
this morning. We have our session on techniques.
I think this is going to be a very good session and mr skippers is in charge.
Thank you.
1: By now, I'm sure you've all become very used to announce changes in the program,
so you're not going to be too disappointed. When I announced another one.
As you know,
a hospital Lewis was going to be with us this morning but couldn't make it
because of illness. So our panel has been cut down to two speakers.
We don't want you to think of this as a debate and we want you to listen to it
in the way we originally intended it. Uh,
this was in part of our idea of bringing views from various disciplines to bear
on oral history.
I think our basic mistake in naming the panel various techniques was and not
making adequate distinction between oral history as a method and the techniques
by which the method is utilized.
So a lot of the things that might be appropriate for a session like this would
probably be better referred to the session this afternoon on standards and goals
and that's one easy way of passing the buck.
So anyhow, instead of uh, saying various techniques in oral history,
we probably would have a better named it.
And I got a little here, uh,
interviewing techniques as they are viewed by representatives of different
disciplines who have employed tape recorders and accumulating information to be
used for historical documentation.
I guess that proves short riddles are just as puzzling as long ones. But
I might add that the size of the printing bill help us decide in the little one.
We did, however,
try to make it clear to our speakers for the session and we asked them to
comment on their interviewing experiences with a tape recorder and to draw from
their particular fields of knowledge to make observations about interviewing.
That would be of help to all of us.
We assumed of course that the approach to interviewing is largely determined by
the objective of the interview or that is how he intends to use the material he
gains and or how he hopes someone else might use it. Of course,
in terms of the present consideration,
the tape recorder is a crucial which is presenting obviously both problems and
promises.
But with this in mind we asked each speaker for suggestions they might have
about improving interviewing techniques.
These considerations should prove helpful in ways oral historians might borrow
interviewing techniques from other disciplines and to what extent they must
involve their own techniques. Uh,
originally Dr. Lewis would have started off this panel and I've been informed
that he did prepare an address and that in the event of published proceedings,
which we certainly will try to get out, the address will be included.
And for those of you who are familiar with some of his works,
he gives some indication of his interviewing ideas and the prefaces to his
books,
particularly the five families and the children Sanchez.
So this morning we'll start off with um, Mr. Charles T Morrissey.
He has an historian and currently director of their Mt historical society.
Visit experiences began in 1962 with oral history at the Harry S Truman library.
Two years later while he was in Washington DC at the time of the assassination
of president Kennedy,
he was asked to take charge of the Kennedy oral history project at the John
Kennedy Memorial library.
He served as chief of this project until August of this year when he assumed the
duties of his present position. As you know,
he's written quite a few articles on oral history that have appeared in several
journals and his experience in oral history has prepared him very well for
discussion of these, uh, ideas on interviewing techniques.
And I understand he's developed some very definite ideas about them.
Mr. Morrison,
2: before you start, Charlie, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
It's been said that some of you are, your teeth are chattering.
Are you too cold? Do you think you could make it or do you want to,
how many want to move passing out blankets? Well,
I think maybe if you are cold, if you get into song
jam,
we could pivot maybe a little bit and move people into the sunlight and have a
table face that wall. Those of you that want to move it,
3: if at anytime you can't hear my voice,
please make appropriate signs from the rear.
And those of you over an Arizona,
I'll try to speak to you.
2: Okay?
3: Yeah. Well, I like this and Vermont, but nonetheless, it's awful cold.
And if any of you, uh, warm up a bit, feel free to help yourself to the water.
You might wonder why a non-practicing oral historian is here,
particularly one the state of Vermont.
We don't have an oral history project in operation.
And of course in dealing with from waters, there are certain obstacles.
Uh,
perhaps you've heard of the man who was married to the same woman for going on
50 years and sitting in front of the fire one night, he looked at her and said,
Abigail, when I think of what you've meant to me all these years,
I can hardly keep from telling ya.
And also maybe you've heard of the Vermonter who went to the city like so many,
half or more than a century now became a very successful businessman.
He was being interviewed on why he was successful and he said,
hard work, Mobileye, hard work. That's why I'm successful. Then he said,
would you mind turning off the set for a minute?
And the set was turned off and he said, that's right. Hard work.
I went out one morning to work on the farm and I worked so hard. I said,
I was going to get outta here and go to listen today.
We've heard a lot about fences and pastures and this is reassuring to have her
mater. I have one across the street from me,
but I was a little concerned yesterday morning that perhaps on people were
dumping things in my pasture and I didn't like that, but nonetheless,
I've dumped a few in myself and we'll pick them up and talk about them.
Perhaps this will strike you as an unorganized presentation on oral history
interviewing, but I think perhaps it's the only way in which to do it.
Let me make a few prefatory observations about techniques.
My experience has been restricted almost entirely to political figures.
Those who have been elected to public office or those appointed to public
office. The more I've discussed oral history with various people,
the more I've become impressed with the fact but techniques and other aspects of
oral history very to the type of person you're interviewing.
My experience with political figures might be different from someone who was
interviewing people in medical research or scientist or early alumni of the
University of California or people in other professions.
Likewise, within any large category of people,
there are individual variations, fat, old, tired,
Congresswoman and bright young man who came to Washington with John F.
Kennedy and some cases younger than I,
which is an unusual experience to be interviewing someone on Kennedy who was
not. Yes, yet, 31 years old.
A lot depends on the interviewer's background and I'm talking now about a single
interviewer. We have tried team interviewing,
but I'm rather lukewarm about it. In some cases it's worked out well,
but it all depends on the person you're talking to. To some people.
Three's a crowd, do others, they enjoy having several people around the table.
For the most part, however, we prefer one interviewer facing one interviewee.
We think that works out best. A lot depends on the interviewer's background,
how much prior research he's done, how many interviews he's already conducted,
how many interviews on the subject that he's going to discuss with the person
before him today.
Did he have a preliminary exploratory interview in which to discuss the project
and the procedures?
That very definitely has an influence in how he would conduct the interview.
How much control does he have over the situation confronting him?
I went in to interview a Senator and let's tell it.
I had 20 minutes and I was 40 minutes late and getting to his office.
Obviously this is a factor if you're rushing for an airplane,
if you've done four interviews and have a fifth one coming up,
obviously you're not in the best of shape to really focus on this one.
I've done as many as five on a single day, uh,
in a city away from home. So obviously you're tired, you're rundown,
you're confused.
In some cases you can't remember if the person you're interviewing says
something to you five minutes ago or somebody you interviewed earlier in the day
said something to you and that very definitely affects your technique
a lot depends on how much control you have over your situation and this,
in my experience with the Kennedy library, I was a very, very serious problem.
Now for the next few minutes,
I'm going to request those who are representatives of the press.
Do kindly consider what I say is off the record. The rest of you,
I hope you'll consider it the same way. It's not for publication.
We had serious problems and when Alan Nevins advises us to be courageous cross
examiners, it's good I believe in it.
But when you're advised not to ask certain questions in your interviews,
you're obviously hindered when you're told certain subjects should not be
discussed. Your technique is obviously affected.
We were told not to ask certain questions of certain people and I'll tell you
what the area was.
There were people who had come to Washington with John Kennedy and were working
with Lyndon Johnson after the assassination.
Our interest was to find out what it's like for a white house staff geared to
one president to suddenly have to work with another one and conversely,
how does a president coming into the office so suddenly and abruptly and
tragically as Lyndon Johnson tried to work with the staff,
he inherits what are the similarities and differences in the way Johnson
prepares speeches or prepares for press conferences, so forth.
Questions like these.
Certainly legitimate historical questions on the Truman project.
We obviously were interested in this when Harry Truman succeeded Franklin
Roosevelt and of course any historian would want to know how Andrew Johnson
handled the same thing. When Abraham Lincoln died,
we were told not to ask about that.
There were other things we were told not to ask about.
We had interviewers hoisted onto the project staff.
We weren't asked if we wanted them. We were told who would have to have them.
In one case, a person was assigned to us.
We spent over $4,600 in salary to him.
He completed I think seven interviews in the course of a year.
The seventh the tape of the seventh was stolen together with his tape recorder,
so we lost probably 5,000 bucks on that.
We had serious troubles with the John F. Kennedy project.
Some of them are humorous. In retrospect,
you might remember a certain character named Francis Morrissey who was put up
for a judgeship, no relation to me,
but I got letters addressed to judge Marcy.
You write Movember what Arthur Slazenger said,
what John Kennedy said about Dean Rusk.
A lot of people thought what Slessinger was doing is what we were doing and if
they said something to us,
it might turn up in life magazine or look magazine or in a book.
0: [inaudible].
3: We were accused of being an undercover CIA operation,
which is very funny until you get tagged with it and try to get rid of it and
there's not much you can do.
Mr Starr mentioned yesterday that if someone in the late 1920s I'd undertaken a
project on the assassination of president Harding,
but this would have cleared up a lot of difficulties.
I propose we do the same on John Kennedy.
I was told we had no business doing that.
We should stay away from the Warren commission.
I think with unfortunate results,
we could've gotten a lot of things on record that might prevent some unfortunate
interpretations developing as time goes by.
0: Okay.
3: The Kennedy project was given to the national archives because it was felt by
several people, myself included at the archives,
could run the project as successfully as Dr. Brooks had run the project at the
Truman library. This unfortunately did not turn out to be the case.
We never got access to the Kennedy papers,
which are now in storage in the national archives. Even though I was there,
the papers were there and those of you who are granted,
but I have written about oral history.
You know how strongly I feel about correlating research and papers with the
actual conduct of interviews.
Many people thought that we were an operation of the Kennedy family,
partly because Evelyn Lincoln was in an office next to mine at the archives
building.
Dave powers was downstairs and they thought it was all tied up together
and that we weren't what we claim to be objective historians.
Trying to document a man's career and a piece of American history
as agents of Cleo at, it's not snow falling,
it's the Canada.
So we're obviously inhibited and this affected our interviewing technique.
Someone asked me yesterday, how do you decide who to interview? Well,
one way to find odd as we did on the Truman project is to go through the papers,
find out who was working on what, what various topics,
various white house staff people worked on who went on the train with Truman in
48 and who wrote the speeches? Let's start a thing on the Kennedy project.
We depended on word of mouth and if some political figure in Wisconsin said you
are an interview with so and so. All that's about all we had to go on.
And so we had the experience of going out to Milwaukee,
interviewing so-and-so and finding out all he had to do with John Kennedy was to
meet him at the airport and drive him to his first public appearance.
And then of course in the course of that,
learning about other names we never heard of.
Having said that, let me go back on the record now.
Yes, you may gold.
I was an employee of the national archives.
4: Yeah,
and then I started there as an old time member of the national archives and I
think trying to just give little bit the wrong impression.
I don't think the national archives was entirely free to this time,
these times even access to the paper and I think I have,
I wouldn't want this to be the go
to stand as an indictment found in the national archives,
but certainly did not have the main responsibility every 30 days.
3: I tried for a year just to get the question raised with the Kennedy family and
was told not to raise it. We did raise it.
I was criticized afterwards for raising it.
Robert Kennedy agreed that we should have access to the papers,
but then he had second thoughts about it. Second thoughts,
I think cultivated by some people around him and as a result,
our efforts to pursue the matter to get it cleared up never succeeded.
And even after I announced I was leaving the project and the number two
interviewer announced he was leaving and the research assistant.
And since that time, practically all the typists down the staff have left,
we have yet to get a single inquiry from the Kennedy family as to what went
wrong. Uh, I agree. It's not entirely a matter at the national archives.
It's a matter of a larger scope. Uh,
in part I think their attitude is understandable.
They've been hurt many times by people doing a Starrco research.
They did not like the book that James McGregor burns wrote in 1959 or 60 called
John F. Kennedy, a political profile.
How many you have read the book by whale and about ambassador Joseph Kennedy,
one of our major problems was dealing with people who had worked with Kennedy
but were now working for Lyndon Johnson and had a different allegiance and with
a certain tension created between these political camps.
We used to call it the government in power and the government in exile.
I didn't want to get caught up on it.
So there was constant procrastination on that score.
I think it was sir Walter Raleigh.
He said something about he who follows too closely on the heels of history,
he's likely to get kicked in the mouth.
Any other yes.
0: [inaudible]
3: this is an interesting point.
A lot of people assume that we had access to the Kennedy papers because if Ted
Sorenson could publish the private conversations between Kennedy and Khrushchev,
we should have access to them too. We weren't publishing anything.
All our material was going into storage for future research use.
None of it has been made available to anybody except those working on the
project staff itself. Now,
what you say is true about not opening government papers to researchers
generally,
but there are ample evidences of historians in the state department,
historians in the military,
branches who have had access to documents not available to the usual run of
people in order to write position papers and other historical documents.
Uh, cool. Sam was up first. I think.
I realize now that that's what should've been done.
I thought at the time that decision was being made that it should go to the
archives because the papers were there and despite some of these problems we
could pursue on that basis. I think Harvard felt,
I know they felt that we could correlate the use of papers with the operation of
the oral history project.
Those with an academic affiliation would have more leverage I think than
government employees and trying to deal with some of these ticklish problems.
On the other side of the pine is this,
Harvard has its own relationship with the Kennedy library and the Kennedy
family. So the situation, while it might've been better,
wouldn't have been perfect.
0: Okay.
3: It is still being operated from the national archives. Uh,
a young man was moved up from the administrative office to serve as my successor
interviews are still being done.
Can we go ahead or back on the record?
Let me say that. To reduce interviewing to a set of techniques
as one person has put it. It's like we do some courtship to a formula
gold call him on his point of this out, Elizabeth Dixon,
this point of the out and some of the things she's written about the UCLA
project, there is a danger of too much reliance on tools
and not relying sufficiently on old fashioned intuition as to which tool to use
in which situation.
It's very easy to be critical of how someone does an interview.
You've probably heard the story of the football player who ran back,
the opening kickoff or the first game for a touchdown.
The coach called him off the field, criticized them for not doing things right.
He cut the wrong way. He used the wrong arm to straight arm, somebody so forth,
and the player said, how was it for distance coach?
We should truly play it by ear as spell it Brookside yesterday,
so what follows is meant to be taken in a cautious, tentative way.
It will sound much more didactic than as intended. The last,
I want to just steal my experience with interviewing about 90 people on the
Kennedy project and about 15 on the Truman project,
a total of probably 120 535 separate interview sessions.
Also, we had what we call it,
volunteer interviewers at the outset of the Kennedy project,
about 135 of them who did a total of about 300 interviews.
When I say volunteers, they were journalists, people in the administration,
colleagues of people to be interviewed, friends, uh,
all sorts of arrangements pulled up on kind of a person to person informal
basis.
There were two other interviewers working with me full time on the Kennedy
project and it was my responsibility to train them and supervise their work.
Also in dealing both with president Trovan and president Kennedy,
our interest was episodic.
We'd interview a person on his association with each of these presidents.
We were not strictly autobiographical and getting his whole story.
This obviously has problems. When you interview someone like Avril Harriman,
you'd like to get the whole story,
but our purpose was to focus on the Kennedy chapter or the Truman chapter as
that may be and hope somebody someday can get the rest.
We just couldn't do everything.
One of the things that we'd emphasize would be to let the interviewee talk.
It's his show. Let him run with the ball. As Lewis star said,
a good interviewer is a good listener.
Oftentimes we would start by saying, when did you first meet John Kennedy?
Or when did you come into his orbit?
And they would take off usually chronologically,
perhaps them turning into a topical treatment, uh,
just running on haphazardly and I would sit and listen.
There was a value to this because he's volunteering.
What's foremost in his recollections? Is this, what's going on?
I'd often sit with a notepad and a pencil,
just writing maybe one or two words about things he had covered or things I
wanted to come back to before the interview started.
I would tell him that I would take notes in the sense of trying to get down just
a word here, a word there,
perhaps asking him later for the correct spelling of a name he mentioned we
would always carry a notepad with us and we went on an interview,
not here in the coat cause you might take your coat off but here in this pocket
with a pin and if you've gotten an interview you want it to be where your notes
were and where your pen was. Then after he had run through his story,
I often would go back and interlace my questions with what he had already said.
Trying to probe deeply into certain points,
raising things that he might have missed.
Asking for examples of generalizations he gave in phrasing our questions.
We found it most important to leave them open ended.
That is not to indicate in the phrasing of the question the answer you expected
to get.
We would not offer alternatives and say was it this way or that or was it either
this way or that way?
We would try to state the question to get him to pick his own.
I'll try not to because he might come up with one that we had not anticipated.
We would avoid the loaded words on that film of the interview done at Berkeley.
That word lobbyist bothered me because some people aren't lobbyists.
There are public relations consultants or industrial representatives or
something else.
We would try very desperately not to impress our own conclusions on the answers
the man was giving. It is very hard to restrain yourself,
but one way we would try to do it would be to phrase our questions.
To what extent was such and such, so not want to subs and stuff, so
we would not try to build a case like a lawyer joining to build a case in a
courtroom.
I used to advise people to read the Warren report because so many times the
attorneys would say, this is the way it was, wasn't it?
And the witness would say yes or no and write down the page.
The answers are yes or no. We went at it saying, tell us how it was.
Let him describe it in his words.
Let him volunteer what he thought was important.
I advise people to read the transcripts of Lauren SPIV acts program,
meet the press, and then do it just the opposite way he does it
and those are available. Incidentally,
they are published and you can get them and it is worthwhile to see how someone
can phrase a tricky question trying to trip up someone being interviewed on that
program.
We would of course avoid jargon and for academic people that's difficult,
but a lot of people in Washington don't like academic people and don't
understand academic publications because of the jargon and Dean after sitting
among others has spoken very forcefully on this point.
Last night we saw a,
some of us saw a filmed interview with Robert Frost in which he was asked about
his plane stopping by woods on a snowy evening. Well,
frost was interviewed on another occasion by another interviewer and afterwards
described the interview. Let me quote to you from Robert Frost.
I think I'll wait.
0: [inaudible]
3: this is frost speaking quote.
He wanted to know what I intended to imply.
When I wrote stopping by woods on a snowy evening. I told him I met.
It was time to go home. Yes,
the interviewer asked,
but what did you have in mind when you made that statement?
I had in mind that it was getting late and I should be moving on.
Yes, pester the interviewer,
but what hidden symbolic meaning did you intend to record
and process? Well, I was about fed up, so I told the interviewer,
I thought it was about time I was getting the hell out of there.
We would try to focus on our interviews,
on the dynamics of how policy was developed.
The actual development of policies. This seems obvious to us,
but many of these volunteer interviewers we had on our project would ask a man
in 1964 or 65 how he appraised policies developed back in 61 and 62 we wanted to
know how the policy developed and then perhaps conclude with his appraisal of
it.
One guideline I would stress perhaps above all others is that a good interviewer
should pursue in detail, pursue in detail,
constantly asking for examples,
constantly asking people to illustrate points they are making.
A good interviewer should not allow intimations to pass into the record without
elaboration of them.
Specifically what did the person mean by such and such?
We would try to keep our questions brief and pointed at most a question in our
opinion should occupy no more than two sentences. One sentence to say,
this is why I'm going to ask you this question and then this is the question I'm
asking you
ending the question with a question Mark and then sitting biting the lip,
keeping quiet, letting the man think,
hopefully let him answer the question.
It's difficult to endure that silent. Pardon me.
That embarrassing silence that bothers us so many socially when we talk,
but in oral history,
I think one of the great dangers is for the interviewer to feel he has to keep
talking until the man itself tries to get a word in edgewise
and interviewer I think tends to rush the interviewee sometimes too strongly.
We would let the man set his own pace and if it was slow from our viewpoint,
nonetheless it was his pace. We let him go at the rate he wanted to go
with the volunteer interviewers and the Kennedy project.
We found time after time,
but they were rushing the man from one point to another and we actually have
cases of a man saying Jessica minute,
can I say something about that last point before you were I shot?
People often ask about Mike fright. Are people afraid of the mix?
Afraid at the tape recording equipment?
Our experience with the Kennedy volunteer interviewers was that the interviewers
are more scared of the equipment than the people being interviewed.
Most of the people being interviewed, we're familiar with microphones.
They had spoken publicly, they dictated their letters and so forth.
But many of the interviewers being volunteers and being new to tape recording
equipment or uh,
uneasy with it and didn't know what they were doing the right thing.
If the volume was high enough and the mic was puzzling at this sort of thing and
it bothered them and bothered the a effect that the quality of the interview.
As a result
when there are very tough questions to be asked,
we learned one to postpone the tough ones until the interview was well underway.
Obviously we wanted to establish good rapport in the longer the interview
lasted. More times than not the man would relax,
open up and even enjoy the occasion. Likewise,
by asking a tough question,
the man might take offense and that would affect the remainder of the interview.
The definition of a tough question varies to different people.
People were offended when we raised the question of John Kennedy's religion as a
factor in the 1960 election.
The strikes us as a very normal question for a political scientist or a story
and to ask about.
Also if we had several tough questions to ask,
we would never ask them consecutively. We would ask one,
handle it and then try to move the interview into an area we knew the man would
want to talk about so he would relax and enjoy it and then perhaps later come
back to another tough one in phrasing the top ones we often did what book
reviewers do.
They'll say some readers might object to the authors tendency to do such and
such, which really means I object to his tendency and doing such and such.
We'd say some people have reported that you got into difficulty on such and such
a project. In other words, we're asking him to answer these anonymous,
some people who aren't in the room pastly in our interviews,
if we had an important subject we wanted to cover,
we would return to it from different angles.
Let's suppose we're interested in the West Virginia primary of 1960 so we talk
about it, why Kennedy defeated Humphrey later.
If we're talking about how the Kennedy campaign was organized,
we might move back into West Virginia from a different angle.
The Kennedy organization in West Virginia, how was it set up?
If later we're talking about public opinion polls,
we'd move into the West Virginia primary from that angle,
talking about campaign finance, we'd move in from there.
If we're talking about the relationship between John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey
throughout their political careers,
we'd move in from there and we were always amazed at how a different approach on
a familiar topic would produce new information. The nature, in other words,
is to think that a matter has been entirely discussed when you cover it once,
drop it and then go on to others and don't come back.
In the course of all of this,
we would try to find out how good the man's memory was when we throw in little
questions. Sometimes the test it, for example,
if he mentioned the name of a person named Lawrence, we'd say,
is that the Lawrence that was governor of Pennsylvania or the Lawrence or rights
where us news and world report and we'd say,
did that happen before or after something else happened and these little clues
someday we assume will help the researcher who's reading the transcript or
listening to the tape to decide how much weight he should put on the testimony
of this person. Likewise,
we would try to find out indirectly how close the person was to the events he
was discussing.
If he was intimately involved or on the periphery and we tried to ask questions
to bring this out and many times somebody would have met, well, no,
I wasn't there when that happened by,
I heard about it afterwards and that of course has great bearing on how much
weight an historian should put on it.
We tried to find out who else was involved in a certain matter,
let's call how the peace Corps speech was prepared in the 1960 campaign,
who was where, who worked on what draft and so forth.
This obviously has leads for the future in an interviewing other people,
you can ask them about it.
We would also ask a lot of these people what other evidence would exist for the
things they're talking about.
Would there have been a memorandum on the subject or did some newspaper man have
entree in his column on that particular subject is reliable.
Did he keep a diary? Was there an exchange of correspondence on it?
And as a result in the long run,
the oral history transcripts at the Kennedy library will say an awful lot about
the documentation in conventional written sources pertaining to the Kennedy
administration.
We would try not to miss the obvious,
even if it seems silly to cover the obvious. For example,
somebody would say,
I was responsible for getting voters registered in the Mexican precincts of Los
Angeles. Well, to him, I suppose this was a uneasy task,
but to us we want to know exactly how do you go about it?
Where do you start and what do you do?
And we'd ask him to elaborate on some of these, uh,
procedures that people in public office and in public affairs conduct.
We don't often use documents in our interviews. That is,
if a man's memory was poor, let's say on the 1948 campaign,
I'd have an itinerary of where a Truman spoke on that campaign.
Each stop right through the day or,
or we present a picture of the people who were present at a certain occasion.
And by seeing the people who were there, he might say, Oh yes,
this fellow helped us with the draft of such and such.
Or we show him newspaper columns and say,
how does this represent your impressions of how such and such happened?
And other occasions we'd set up on a hypothetical adversary.
This is a technique that Forrest Pogue of the George Marshall library has used.
He'd say to someone, you were present when Roosevelt died,
and some day someone's going to write a book saying Roosevelt was monitored.
How would you answer that? And of course,
the fellow would offer all sorts of evidence in response to it.
There are many times when we were stuck,
we were covering matters we didn't know much about,
so we'd rely on the old fashioned journalistic technique of who, what, when,
where, how, why, so forth. Also,
constantly in the course of entering the interviewing,
we try to put ourselves in the position of the person being interviewed.
We try to visualize the web he operated in if he had work to do it with people
in Congress and the white house, the Bureau of the budget, other departments,
the press lobbyists, the democratic national committee.
We try to visualize how he must operate with all these other people in
Washington and in that way,
try to think of questions that would perhaps bring to light some of these
relationships.
We'd also try to put ourselves in the viewpoint of other students who would be
interested in what this person had to say,
and suddenly the oral historian becomes an economist or a sociologist or he
says, final biographer of John Kennedy.
What can this person offer about the biography of Kennedy?
If I'm a student of public administration,
what can he offer about certain procedures that were conducted?
We'd ask ourselves, how does this fellow spend his day?
Where does this time go and if you can figure that out,
you can figure out what kind of questions to put to him.
We would send our transcripts back to be edited by the person interviewed in the
eyes of many people. This is considered to be an indulgence to the interviewee.
We used it as a second opportunity to ask questions we didn't think to ask.
In the first interview, we would ask for the elaborations.
We would clip a question to the side of the page and say, Senator,
could you give an example of this? In some cases,
if a man is not covered a subject in the transcript,
we would leave a blank section and say,
would you mind writing in and tan a little more on this?
And with that blank paper in front of him when he's going through the
transcript,
sometimes he would actually sit there and fill it up with 250 words or so in
contributes in material. That was valuable. Also,
if you chicken out in an interview and don't ask the tough questions,
you can always ask them when you send the transcript back to the editor.
I think the key question in assessing an oral history transcript is really not
how much material does it provide for history,
but rather how well did the interviewer do with the circumstances affecting him
and the material he had to work with.
You can't blame the interviewer if the interviewee has a bad memory.
Perhaps you've heard the story of,
of Jack Curtis who coached football at Stanford for many years. Uh,
and he had a losing season and it's no longer coaching at Stanford,
but he was showing a film of one of the games to the Stanford alumni and in the
film, the quarterback beta back to throw a forward pass. He was rushed.
The quarterback faked out one man straight armed,
another outran a third ran across the field,
threw the ball 60 yards down the field.
It was caught by one of his own teammates for a touchdown.
And while all this was going on on the screen,
Curtis was shouting from the back of the room, look at me, coach, look at me,
coach. Well,
you can't play in the interviewer if the interviewee doesn't do a good job,
but you can blame the interviewer if he doesn't take advantage of every
opportunity available to him and it seems to me that's the key question.
If the interviewer did the best he could with what he had,
you can't blame him for the results. If he did less than that,
you can blame him and I think he should be blamed appropriately.
Let me say that very little has been written about techniques of oral history.
I hope in the future if we form an association that we can have workshops on
this to bring to bear our varying experiences to help the uninitiated perhaps to
see actual transcripts and have the interviewer why he did certain things and
didn't do it elsewise likewise,
I think somebody very productively could prepare a 30 minute tape with three
voices on it and interviewer and interviewee and a narrator.
The narrator saying why the interviewer is doing this or if the interviewer
makes a mistake,
the narrowed or perhaps pointing out what the mistake is and what he could have
done that was different.
Interviewing in conclusion is very difficult when you think that the good
interviewer must know his stuff.
He must be listening to what the man is saying to think of more questions to
ask. He must be thinking of what the question was.
He just asked to make sure the man is answering it.
He must know what's already been covered. He know what he has yet to cover.
He must anticipate where he's going to go.
If the man while he's talking indicates he's about through with the subject and
anticipating where the conversation is going to go,
he must in his mind be beginning to try to formulate that so it'll come out well
phrased. It's very difficult business.
Anyone who does it successfully is probably so successful that he should be
interviewed and not doing the inner going consult. Thank you very much.
We've been counting purple noses and it was decided that we'd want to go get
some coffee up there and if you would prefer to continue the session in the
living room rather than coming back out here. It's all right.
How many would like to go out there and finish? I guess we have a majority,
so we'll Reyes.
1: We will now return to our discussion on interviewing techniques and dr Catlin
will lead the session.
Dr Carolyn has lived in Los Angeles for 23 years.
He has been a practicing cycline let's be 15 of those years.
He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and received his training in
psychoanalysis in Los Angeles.
He is a member of the American medical association,
the American psychoanalytic association,
and a fellow of the American psychiatric association,
dr candle and his awesome assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA.
His interest in oral history began in 1962 when is the chairman of the Los
Angeles psychoanalytic society.
He began working on preparing the history of the society
as part of the effort to document this facet of the psychoanalytic movement in
Southern California.
Dr Kanvan and three of his colleagues began conducting tape recorded interviews
with a group of pioneer members of this society.
I hope that some of you have had a chance to look at the sample of some of these
interviews in the lobby. I find them fascinating. I'm sure you will.
Dr Kenyon is now in the process of assessing these interviews along other
materials
2: in preparation for a publication of the history of the society.
In our association with dr [inaudible],
our office staff has been very greatly impressed,
not only with his feeling for history,
but his observations about interviewing in general.
I'm sure you will be off back the candle
doors. I joined many of you shaking
and I couldn't be sure if it was the weather or the difficult job I have.
No, I'm still shaking because I know I have a hard job.
I hold it position of chairman of the steering committee.
The committee is one of the standing committees of the Los Angeles
psychoanalytic society.
This is a chapter of a national organization,
the American psychoanalytic association.
We are a group of about 100 members.
The earliest among this group came to Los Angeles about 30 or even 40,
about, uh, even, uh, almost as long as 40 years ago.
The majority of the pioneer members had their training in Europe,
many of them European born,
but not necessarily some of the very interesting members or Americans who had,
uh, training in Europe and then returned here to practice.
And naturally they have interesting insights into the early European
psychoanalytic scene. For,
for almost 10 years,
there's been a vague sense of the potential significance of organizing and
preserving the history of the psychoanalytic movement in California.
The growth and extension of analysis in America continues the development of
this science and philosophy founded by segment fraud,
the evolution, uh, in a formal, uh,
papers, scientific psychoanalytic papers. Uh,
there's always a great deal of historical saints that is the evolution of a
particular problem or theory under consideration is always a given,
given a scrutiny by a literature review. However,
that's somewhat different with what preoccupies me.
Fried's genius included a flow of new concepts extended into unexplored areas.
Often these were preliminary extended later by his followers.
Uh, I'm trying to refer to the history of ideas,
which is the highest level of historical top,
uh,
somewhat beyond the scope of any of the work that I and my committee have done.
But again, uh,
is implicit in every or most scientific papers that is quite as the history of
this idea
more closely related to my work or even largely is the history of persons.
That is those persons who followed Freud in the psychoanalytic movement,
especially those who came to California.
What were their aims, their actions, their accomplishments?
Where did they come from? How did they adjust Rucker,
their problems? What were their rewards.
History is eventually a scrutiny of individual lives through a process of
identification with these people.
Each of us share their problems and hopefully avoid some of their mistakes
intimately associated with the persons in the psychoanalytic history is the
history of organization.
This derives a good deal from the tense and emotional aura,
which inevitably is associated with the emergence.
New discoveries, debate,
controversy,
and dissension have not been absent from psychoanalytic deliberations.
Their force has changed the course of psychoanalytic organization.
Freud himself had a great zeal for a strong central society of analysts.
This,
he felt to be a guarantee against the erosions of deviation,
opportunism and quackery.
A principle evolution in America and California has been the development of
authorized and organized training centers who would aim at maintaining a high
standard of ethical and technical excellence
in this way. I'm trying to give you a kind of an overview,
my personal viewpoint,
something I've evolved in the several years I've been preoccupied with this uh,
area. Uh,
I broke the back with various techniques.
I was appointed a committee member and then the chairman at that time didn't
seem to know what to do.
So I became the chairman and I didn't know what to do.
Uh, instant historian. And
I think I told that Jim may and I was as if we took a librarian and told him to
practice medicine,
uh, bad. It wasn't quite that.
Then I had access to a certain manuscript and material of
which was in a back room at the Institute office and storage.
It took a long time to find it. Nobody told me it was there.
I made appeals at meetings for people to supply manuscript material with very
poor results or let it,
let me say a few people were generous, but there were very few.
So I started interviewing a paper pencil course,
miserable results I happened to read and the Westwood independent,
which is an excellent throwaway newspaper,
but a Fletcher Barbara next mayor of Los Angeles would,
uh,
convince a study of the history of Los Angeles and down in some smell at the
bottom
where the names of Elizabeth Dixon and dice newness at UCLA who were,
were presumably, I guess going to do the real work.
So I phoned the Elizabeth Dixon and learned that there was such a technique as
the oral history work that they were doing.
So I commenced,
it did have done some things with it,
not very much even to date yet I think enough to have learned.
I in my committee have learned some of the fundamentals.
I'll following an outline,
which I believe was distributed and these pits,
I don't believe that, well,
at least your speakers were circulated with an outline. The
UCLA staff had an, uh, an outline,
which I have chosen to follow just briefly now to get into the meat and
potatoes. I've interviewed technique.
The first, the interviewer,
our interviews were generally younger colleagues of the distinguished older
analysts. Uh,
this worked out well because the younger colleague is already an expert in the
field
and he had a curious attitude about what the older man and perhaps is even as
European experiences amounted to
these younger people who are ordinarily a student generation who had been
trained by the respondents.
So you can see we had to begin with a good thing going.
That is the younger analyst interviewing the older analyst
[inaudible] and
analysts ordinarily are listen.
But in these interviews,
many questions were asked and in the sense that an interview is a dialogue
between two persons,
Oh no third person should participate or be present
to instances of, uh,
wishfully helpful wives set and,
and made contributions,
which are very confusing for our,
because of trans transcription difficulties largely or they were too distant
from the microphone. They were sitting in the corner knitting.
I would throw in their remarks and you couldn't quite hear. Then
another obstacle was chirping birds and barking dogs.
Control of the interview. Uh,
certainly the interviewer should ask questions. Uh,
we don't want a monologue.
What is aim for is a synthesis of carefully inquiry and thoughtful response.
In general, avoid a fixed and rehearsed performance.
Rather, the ideal should aim at free association.
I use a psychiatric term, psychoanalytic term,
and I urge a subjective orientation. By all means,
challenges tend to stifle corrections,
should be minimal during the course of an interview or at least discreet and
diplomatic. In the second interview,
there is more opportunity for questions or suggestions or hints from the
interviewer, but again, to be used minimally.
If the flow from the subject is free, spontaneous,
and productive. In any interview,
the principle of an associative and of nieces should apply.
Again, I apologize for a technical phrase.
Uh, this you perhaps all know,
this implies a freedom from rigid chronology or programmed order of development
or avoiding stereotyped question and ants.
The stereotype of question and answer method, which is an awful trap.
Maximum productivity follows if freedom is developed toward associations in
ideas free from the tensions of the fixed outline.
My boarding,
by all means the atmosphere of a compulsive adherents to completing one question
at a time.
Notes prepared in advance by either interviewer or interviewee,
in my opinion,
tend to discourage the desired freedom but need not be eliminated entirely.
Sometimes they are useful to the elderly who are uncertain about details or
dates.
Sometimes we've turned off the recorder as a courtesy to allow comments aside or
to gather together a new line of thoughts.
Invariably, good material gets missed,
better to include everything and edit later.
Anything considered immaterial or unsuited
regarding time and setting of the interview should be conducted on the
respondent's home grounds.
Give him this advantage in his home or office
should be limited to comfortable a duration,
60 or 90 minutes
and no more a second interview if desired.
Should follow within a week or two.
Don't wait too long because otherwise certain continuity is interrupted.
Smoking and drinking are useful on occasion to promote the a little
conviviality. Avoid interruption for lunch,
arrange it so there is no interruption for lunch.
I've discovered that the table conversation may well cover the most interesting
details and they will not be repeated again in any subsequent recording
about motivating the interviewee.
Repeatedly I encountered the protest from the respondent.
Well,
this or that particular recollection is personal history and not at all of any
interest to the history of our organization.
Perhaps beforehand or reassurance should routinely be go in the personal details
or the warp and woof of history.
This is usually easy to make clear but it's important to say it and to emphasize
it.
A personal involvement seems to get downgraded in the mind of the respondent and
I'm sure out of a feeling that his self esteem is somehow under a threatened or
his son under excessive scrutiny
or, uh,
he has a mistaken concept that the only big events make history which we know
differently
if necessary at this point. One explains the uh, the uh,
the function of later editing which aims at accuracy but also the elimination of
threats of libel or slander,
which has already been commented
about editing transcripts. Uh,
I can describe some of my experiences without knowing the final answer about
ideal practice.
We follow the UCLA technique of keeping the initial transcript,
allowing the interviewee to edit it if he is so inclined,
and then making a final transcript of his, his edited version.
In our relatively limited experience,
some subjects have not changed anything,
which is ideal. Others have changed quite a bit,
which is tragic.
The ladder is unfortunate.
The again obviously considers his product of immortal documentary importance,
polishes it up to eliminate slips and awkward constructs reducing its humanity
and making it less of a free and spontaneous dialogue.
Perhaps in these instances of future rewriting of the initial interview would
have to be done using the initial transcript to find out what really went on.
Oh, I thought I'd continue. And, uh,
expanding a little about the history of psychiatric interviewing,
uh, I, the, uh,
oral history literature on display here.
I read through the courtesy of the UCLA staff and
I described them as relatively sharp papers published in scholarly journals or
read to at meetings of historical societies.
Uh, these are, uh, general expositions, you know,
with a description of interview process, the transcribing
or historical research potential and so forth.
Real details of interviewing technique are only relatively rarely encountered,
although
Prince Bowl's principles are described.
It's from principals that we have the foundation for.
A theory of a final step though of course would be to evolve a technique
in describing to you psychiatric interviewing.
Perhaps you can make some of the comparisons through oral history interviewing.
There are some similarities and conversely some contrast.
You have a seminar Lee each the dialogue between two human beings,
one of the two aiming to gain knowledge in the form of data and insights from
the second,
the second presumably cooperating to transmit this knowledge.
They contrast lies in the
name of the psychiatric interview.
Modern psychiatry was born in jail,
the asylum in the arms house and grew up as a servant to the custodian.
At first, there was little need for interviews.
Examinations were cursory diagnosis was minimal.
Therapy did, did not really exist.
Gradually with the improvement though facilities,
there was a need for mental examination. However,
not yet for much therapy or certainly not much,
not much for interview as therapy,
mental illness was attributed to mystical sources.
Later on quite a bit was attributed to physical causes.
Each thought rarely available to cure,
not until the [inaudible] era of moral treatment in the Dawn of psychogenic
theory of mental illness did interview emerge and its present importance.
The discoveries of Freud and his followers have hastened this movement and now
the interview stands as the basic tool of psychiatry by means of interviewing
diagnostic illumination and therapeutic intervention.
Proceed usually simultaneously
the primacy of interview as therapy was alone time,
a borning not only because recognition,
the psychic Genesis submitted all this was resisted but also because psychiatry
inherited a burdensome legacy from general medicine.
The join the club psychiatry had to observe the rules.
You had to follow the crowd.
I refer to a fixed tradition in medicine drummed into every medical student that
first of all they takes the patient's history,
then he proceeds to the examination,
then he makes the diagnosis and finally will recommend or carry out treatment.
The psychiatrist has not escaped this teaching or this tradition substituting
only mental examination for physical examination.
Even today,
students are taught in some places this old fashioned routine,
the history, long,
methodical and by syllabus followed by mental status examination,
usually equally exhausted and exhausting.
Finally reaching the Senate of a diagnostic formulation and concluding treatment
recommendations. All right,
let me illustrate from noise and cold,
which is psychiatry's most popular textbook now in five or even six editions
in quotes,
they recommend in quotes a flexible manner that the following bases are to be
touched in taking the history first,
the presenting problem. That is what is the chief complaint?
That's a site and to ban the present illness,
a paragraph or two,
but Vancouver fluting or continuing hardly concluding her.
Read it to you.
Then this it those along the developmental and home factors involving influences
and experiences during childhood personality formation. That's a month ago,
and childhood and adolescent characteristics in school history,
occupational history, medical history, psychosexual history,
marital history, social adaptability,
general activity and interests,
personality traits and characteristics, and finally,
emotionally disturbing experiences.
No.
Having concluded that we proceed to the mental examination which proceeds under
the following headings, general appearance,
manner in attitude,
consciousness meaning state of consciousness after sex.
0: Yeah.
2: Apperception affectivity and mood,
cognition and expressive aspects of behavior,
associations and thought processes,
fat content and mental trend perception,
memory, fund of information, judgment,
insight and personal maturity to be followed by special psychological tests as
indicated. Well,
of course then the next step is a diagnostic pharm innovation,
choosing a pigeonhole from the large available to segment
and then the car's making a recommendation for treatment.
If psychotherapy is the recommendation,
presumably we'll commence at some later date today.
The principles in this encounter are exhausted,
but some relief is that hand CyberU does important discoveries have been made,
which lift the burden at least change it from such a rigid routine with a little
chance of success really to set the more flexible and with succession success at
hand.
The first discovery was the discovery that the history and mental examination
need not and indeed cannot be separate.
While relating his history,
the patient reveals his psychopathology.
Well, this is certainly a desirable economy, but hold on.
Another discovery pushes this further therapy can not wait either,
but commences with the beginning of the interview or even earlier.
Many people feel better when they call up for the appointment,
closely related as another discovery.
That is the psychiatrist is not merely an observer.
This isn't a one way process.
He's also a participant in a live.
Li let her change in a subtle psychic dialogue,
transcending even the exchange of the words.
This is a commerce that sometimes comes too close for comfort.
At which side of the desk do I belong.
It reminds me of the definition of a psychiatrist.
He's a nervous man who has made the discovery at which side of the desk he
chooses to sit.
So we have moved away from tradition.
We've moved away from the traditional, the fixed outline, the rigid,
ordering our procedures towards something more or a mess.
Permissive, perceptive, non directive.
I use the word associative and of nieces coined by
Felix Deutsch, an eminent psychoanalyst. A book.
Many of you have
low Abad be possibly a bread.
Theodore Reich listening with the third year.
Well, this is a wonderful title, implying silk.
Clearly the technique which aims at listening beyond manifest content of the
spoken words to reach some of the subtleties of the own spoken language of the
unconscious.
The discoveries of fried have given us the third year and now the emphasis is on
understanding the phenomenon of human behavior rather than collecting and
cataloging them.
Now the interview becomes a close human experience designed to foster the
relationship.
This gives rise to a new vocabulary of technical terms such as empathy,
rapport, transference and countertransference.
And the methods of have been added. Free association,
dream analysis and analysis of slips.
Uh, a very respected writer, uh,
Harry stack Sullivan considered the interview as designed primarily to discover
obscure problems of living difficulties the patient cannot himself understand
clearly and about which he may even this lead to himself and others.
These difficulties can be conceptualized only when one grasps what kind of
person, what sort of a person to patient is, what he does, why he does it,
and then helps him to understand equally this knowledge.
I can quote now from some of the books that I S theme
and sort of paraphrase
one is Gil in red,
like Merton Gill and Frederick Redlich. Uh,
the initial interview in psychiatry. Uh,
I thought, I thought it was illuminating and might be interesting to you.
What are the major determinants of the interview and using the word determinants
in the sense of what are the results
listed as three first,
the personalities of the participants.
No two persons will conduct an interview alike nor will any to respond to life
because no two people are that are identical in personality with the possible
exception of identical twins in the first few days of life.
Examples of personality determinants, uh, uh,
examples affecting, uh,
the behavior of the interviewer might be that person who quickly it needs to
show how clever he is or how authoritarian,
what an important person he is. Or it might be excessively friendly,
maybe basically struggling with struggling with some POS that he may be
blustering or challenging or sarcastic.
A second determinant is listed by Gil and red lick.
Uh,
this isn't entirely clear and stealing it from them.
I hope I get the gist of it,
but they refer to the socially defined roles of the participants to illustrate
an uneducated person may think of a psychiatrist as a threatening authority
figure,
feared because all his patients are insane or so he thinks and feared for his
powers, mind reading and brainwashing.
Uh,
more sophisticated people are of course are free from casting the psychiatrist
in this rather frightening girl.
A college girl will S will see him as masculine, virile, real cool
and so forth and so forth. Now the psychiatrist,
the psychiatrist himself, miss be alert to
some of these considerations and I
[inaudible] it by saying he should be as able to listen alertly and intently to
his pre chronic patients as to those who have enough to pay fees in his private
practice.
That is he shouldn't with first into an inferior role,
but he shouldn't overestimate the second.
The third determinant would be purpose of the interview
influences the course and content of the session. And again,
I illustrate by example the suffering, anxious,
neurotic person seeking help.
Real come and be completely Frank and cooperative.
But what about the delinquent? Who has no wish for therapy,
who has been sent by the court is a condition of probation.
That's a very different circumstance.
Gillen, red lick. Continue speaking.
Something about aims of therapy and
this might be useful in trying to orient you into
generally what does the interview try to accomplish?
The first would be to create a rip por,
uh, to uh,
facilitate communication and the techniques here are common sense techniques.
We use decency, consideration,
pact guarding against haste, hostility or inpatients.
And then I suppose the real aim is to make an appraisal
of the person and the disorder, uh,
and in so doing,
try to guess what kind of motivation is there here for therapy and what is the
capacity for therapy.
And then finally moving on to therapy itself
in more detail.
I font giving you a on more detail. I am fond of,
and I will paraphrase from another of the very popular books in psychiatric
education call a primmer for psychotherapists by Kenneth Mark Colby of San
Francisco.
He States the aim is to relieve the patient of distressing neurotic symptoms
or discarded personality characteristics which interfere with satisfactory
adaptations. To the world of people. Our events.
A brief review of the concept of mind may or may not fit in here,
but I can make it so brief. Again,
paraphrasing Colby.
The mind is an apparatus which has as one of its functions,
the Pasch of maintaining a state of equilibrium.
It deals with stimuli which panned to raise a state of tension.
The mind seeks to either discharge or bind this tension.
The stimuli code from two directions or roughly externally or internally.
The external ones are those initiated by sensory perception.
Internal stimuli are those originating within and we might label then wishes or
instinctual impulses such a wish impulse can be discharged or boned depending
upon the executive action of the mind.
That is the mind decide harmonious. The regulation of stimuli.
Maintaining a state of equilibrium is necessary to normal mental functioning.
Sometimes the mind is incapable of successfully binding impulses and the result
is neurotic conflict manifest by symptom or disturbed attitude.
Psychotherapy aims to produce a favorable change in this disturbed balance
leading to a fuller gratification of the wish or at least to a more suitable
compromise.
The first task is to make an appraisal as mentioned above,
the therapist aims to see the wish defense system involved and then secondly to
offer this by series of maneuvers.
This is the basis of a theory of therapy.
The pack dicks are the tools by which the therapist pursues his aim are are the
statements made by him chiefly
interposes oceans and inter interpretations.
These are not so technical words which I think are clear to you at this point.
You can see a major difference between oral history and review and the
psychiatric therapy.
Interview therapy is not a name in oral history but is indeed the [inaudible] in
the psychiatric history therapy,
historical data about the patient's life.
Therefore assume the secondary position and the psychiatric interview.
While these are primary for the historic,
the tactics implied by therapist and historian will necessarily differ but with
a considerable measure of overlapping in as much as each is urging a free flow
of thought and speech
that does this mean that psychiatrists can contribute to teaching?
I've interviewed techniques as applied to historical and other non-therapeutic
and interviewing. I think so. Uh,
if oral history grows as is the ambition of the people here you're going to of
the problems will be to achieve effective economies.
We hear about costs and certainly teaching a technique will evolve as a
necessary step in this teaching,
at least our review of psychiatric interviewing techniques.
We'll have a place along with the contributions of other disciplines,
uh, journalism, interviewing, social work,
interviewing or we heard yesterday about cross examination,
maybe legal interviewing
at this point of that may be well to consider the problem with the so called
common sense approach.
That is the argument that interviewing technique can not and perhaps even opt
not to be taught.
The proponent of this view holes in interviewing is within the realm of ordinary
social experience with basic skills already held to some degree by all persons.
A large degree by talented persons.
And that extra skills are within reach by experience and the teaching of
interviewing is unnecessary and even feudal.
Uh,
it will be stated that interviewing has had universal applications for a long
time and in many ways in industry, social sciences,
casework and other are researches all without the benefit of special techniques.
However, in my estimate, this is not particularly true.
I think techniques have been evolved,
perhaps studied and taught, uh,
maybe not necessarily very formally,
maybe not documented,
but largely by preceptorship,
which is incidentally the way psychoanalytic and psychiatric techniques are
still taught largely by preceptorship.
My own experiences in teaching have included supervising of psychotherapy
conducted by resident physicians and medical students.
This is certainly teaching and I can testify to instances where,
uh, errors of the student could be defined,
corrected and with good results following I myself,
I've experimented, uh, with uh,
direct observation of teaching.
Rather traditional is to send the student or the,
and the patient into the room for an hour and if the student emerges,
uh,
give him another hour to let him describe what happened.
Uh, however, by
I am not original with me have experimented direct observation.
That is,
we go in with the student and we allow him to be identified as the physician.
And I sit this one side and identified as a friendly consultant in a secondary
role,
but I have the opportunity of observing directly,
and this course has proven to me that there are mistakes that are easy to pick
up for me to pick up and afterwards easy to correct.
Oh. So I conclude with
a sense of zeal that there is something
I bought a need for developing.
Not only a theory of interviewing, but certainly a technique of interviewing.
And it's a technique which can be analyzed and taught.
Perhaps the teaching will come from these different schools that I mentioned.
I hope I've given you something. Thank you.