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Methodology

Methodology

Life stories are a biographical method for documenting the past of a particular person. As such, they have importance not only as an insight in the history of a particular person, but also in the entire historical context, values, tradition, language and the other features of the time in which that person lived. The life stories help in reconstructing the past and in understanding how people interpret and perceive the past.

The purpose of this method is not to attain one absolute truth, but to acknowledge that there can be more than one truth, that every person has its own truth and that they all matter. That reveals our need to focus on the personal stories as a source in our analysis of the traumatic past. They enable us to “hear each other out as humans” and not just as Macedonians, Albanians, Roma… And even more importantly, the understanding of the similarity of one’s own experienced drama and tragedy with the ones experienced by the “other” has the power to change one’s own antagonistic perception of the “others”, precisely through the ubiquity of the authentic human trauma.

By publishing the life stories, we hope to help increase the level of mutual trust among people from different ethnic or religious backgrounds, first of all as individuals, and then with the hope that it could be passed on to the social level.

The methodology Peace Action uses for collecting the life stories is closely linked with oral history as a modern technique in collecting historically relevant testimonies about certain events, periods and experiences of the past through individual memories.

Focus groups

Throughout the work of collecting life stories, starting from 2008, we have worked with four different groups. In the period of 2008-2009, we worked with the “Youth” group, where we focused on the life stories of people who had been no older than 26 in 2001. In 2010 we collected life stories from women, in 2011 from internally displaced persons, and in 2012 life stories from members of the minority ethnic communities in Macedonia.

Geographically, we mainly targeted people from the regions where the war was with higher intensity. Thus, the majority of narrators are from the region of Tetovo, Kumanovo and Lipkovo, as well as the city of Skopje and its surroundings. There are also some interviews from other parts of Macedonia, mostly with persons who were directly involved in military actions in the above mentioned regions, or persons coming from families which were deeply scarred by the war.

Interviewers

A group of 20 interviewers has worked on collecting life stories in the past years. Some interviewers have been involved in this process from the very beginning and are still here, while others were involved only in a specific series, i.e. worked only with a specific group of narrators. First of all, they are people coming from the abovementioned regions, but at the same time they are people with whom we had cooperated in the past, who have participated in some of the peacebuilding trainings organized by Peace Action or whom we have met on other occasions.

Each new series of collecting life stories begins with a Training for interviewers for collecting life stories, where interviewers learn the practical skills for making an interview and get familiar with the method of oral history and the deeper contextual analysis specific for each group.

Interviews

The interviews are made in the form of a semi-structured interview. The main focus during the interviews is on the period before and during 2001. The last part of the interviews usually contains questions about the future. How should we proceed further? Can we make it together? How?

Procedure for collecting and processing of the stories

  • The interviews are being taped with a digital audio technique. Each interview has its own audio record, as well as some papers, filled in by the interviewer in cooperation with the narrator. They contain a lot of additional information about the narrator, some technical information about the conduction of the interview, as well as information on the level of public accessibility of the interview. The narrator has an absolute freedom to choose the level of public accessibility of his/her story. One of the options the narrator is being offered is to completely limit the public accessibility, by choosing to simply donate their story to the Peace Action archive, without allowing its publishing in any form. Another option is to allow for it to be published, but to attain the narrator’s anonymity. The basic rules of collecting each story were that each story has to offer information about the narrator and has to be delivered on an audio recording. The level of public accessibility of the story, desired by its narrator, is guaranteed by Peace Action. The stories on this website have been published with permission of their narrators. Those who chose full public accessibility of their stories will be published under their full name. Other stories are published under the narrator’s initials, while for those who demanded full anonymity of their identity, we use the abbreviation “NN”.
  • Transcription of the interviews. In the transcripts of the interviews we insisted on literal transcription of the speech: the transcription had to be identical with the original narration and no interventions were allowed, not even when the narrator does not present a logical stream of speech. The parts that could not be understood from the audio record are usually marked as “(unclear)” or “[…]”. If the interviewer is certain what exactly the narrator was trying to say, but that is not included in her/his narration, then those words are added in the form of “[abcdefg]” with the purpose of better understanding of the text. If a longer break occurs during the narration, or the narrator cries or laughs, that is usually added in the form of “(laughs)”, with the purpose of presenting a better picture of the emotional condition of the narrator during certain parts of the interview.
  • Translation of the interviews. After full processing, all interviews are made available both in Macedonian and Albanian, meaning that the interviews made in Macedonian are translated in Albanian and vice versa. All interviews found on this website or in any of our publications are available in both languages.
  • Preparation of the interview for publishing. A list is made of key words, which typically refer to the locations mentioned in the interview.