In her article "Exile, Homeland, and Milieu in the Oral Lore of Carpatho-Russian Jews" Ilana Rosen analyzes oral narratives of Central and East European Jewish communities. The Jewish people have spent most of their lifetime outside their promised land. Accordingly, their ethos, as reflected by holy teachings, expresses a yearning for a return to the holy land by divine agency once the nation i...

Oral history provides researchers opportunities to assess narratives and compare them to existing theories of aging. Oftentimes the discussion of psychosocial theories of aging does not include the oldest-old. The purpose of this study was to assess evidence of psychosocial theories of aging within oral history narratives from a subsample of 20 centenarians from the Oklahoma 100 Year Life Oral ...

Narrative ability is one of the most promising ways to assess communicative competence in children: Coordination of lexical, morphosyntactic, phonological, and pragmatic elements is needed to produce narrations. Narratives might even serve as a diagnostic tool for Specific Language Impairment, since children with Specific Language Impairment are reported to have difficulties producing (oral) na...

This study investigated the possible pragmatic change concerning the narrative production of older adults. Brazilian young and older adults residing in Porto Alegre/BR were instructed to tell personal and fictitious stories. Propositions of their discourse were analyzed in terms of relevance, subjectivity and repetition. Older adults presented a greater proportion of indirectly relevant proposi...

Several scholarly trends, such as narrative medicine, patient-centered and relationship-centered care, have long advocated for the value of the patient's voice in the practice of medicine. As theories of textual analysis are applied to the understanding of stories of illness, doctors and scholars have the opportunity to develop more nuanced and multifaceted appreciation for these accounts. We r...

OBJECTIVE To explore how birthing and maternity care are understood and valued in a rural community. DESIGN Oral history research. SETTING The rural community of Marathon, Ont, with a population of approximately 3500. PARTICIPANTS A purposive selection of mothers, grandmothers, nurses, physicians, and community leaders in the Marathon medical catchment area. METHODS Interviews were cond...

Institutional change has a human face. This paper explores how a select group of women in China and India experienced economic and political turmoil and why they chose to become change agents. Through in-depth interviews with 40 women from NGOs, government agencies and private business, four broad moments in the evolution of a change agent are identified and discussed: (1) awareness of a double...

After an introductory course in experiential-integrative psychotherapy, 21 graduate students provided personal narratives of their experiences, which were analyzed using the grounded theory method. Results produced 37 hierarchically organized experiences, revealing that students perceived multiple changes in both professional (i.e., skill acquisition and learning related to the therapeutic proc...

1. Oral sources and oral history The phrase oral history is a common abbreviation for what we might describe, more articulately, as the use of oral sources in history or the social sciences. 1 In its most elementary form, the oral narratives and testimony which constitute oral history are but an additional tool in the historian's panoply of sources, and are therefore subject to the same critica...