Introduction

Among the most sought-after archive materials in the Nordiska museet are the "Workers Autobiographies" (Arbetarminnena). This collection was begun in the early 1940s by Mats Rehnberg, an etymologist with a strong interest in social history. He drew partly on the trade union press, and the collection includes the writings of many different types of manual workers, e.g. sawmill workers, printers, carpenters, municipal workers and sharecroppers. At the same time, the museum has acquired a vast quantity of autobiographical material in the form of answers to questionnaires regarding particular subjects. Both the autobiographies and the replies to the questionnaires are collectively referred to here as life stories.

Although the material is much in demand and frequently quoted, astonishingly, not much use of it has been made for research purposes. This, indeed, applies not only to the Nordic Museum but also to institutions in other countries with similar material. This is partly due to lack of proper methods of handling and analysis.

The Nordic Museums work with correspondents commenced in 1927. The number of correspondents was built up during the years and ranged from 200 to 500 persons. Today, we have just under 500 correspondents. The textual input is now approximately 200 000 pages.

We have asked about almost every aspect of life – dress and food habits, relationships with friends and relatives. Our latest questionnaire is about homecleaning. We then also cooperate with "Etnologisk gransking" in Oslo which sends the same questionnaire about homecleaning to their correspondents. We will be able to compare Swedish and Norwegian homecleaning.

The rest of this paper is thus about principles and methodological questions we find important, both for the collecting and analysis of autobiographical materials.

One's Own Life or Other People's?

It is usual in the Dig-Where-You-Stand Movement and presumably in Oral History, as well for those involved that they find their own lives uninteresting from a "scientific" viewpoint. They wish to collect facts about general conditions from transactional records, circulars and books and possibly from elderly people with good memories. The authors of several life stories tone down their personal experiences in view of observations about general conditions, such as pay and conditions of service.

This justifies an appeal to people writing down their life stories to describe their own lives, experiences and values, and an appeal to this end is in fact made by the Nordic Museum in the course of its collecting activities. If life stories are dominated by a knowledge of other people's circumstances, "local conditions" etc. then researchers are obliged to treat them as secondary sources, which greatly limits their value.

Narrative or Statement

Life stories can be analysed as literature or as a source, as a narrative or as a statement. They become narratives if they are taken to refer to the time about which the informant is writing. This becomes a source material, if it is taken as a manifestation of the time in which informants are writing. Consider, for example, the following quotation from a sawmill worker born in Nedertorneå, in the far north of Sweden in 1878: I have always regarded union membership as the first duty of a worker.

Does this mean, for example, that at the age of 20 he felt it was natural, right and proper for workers to organise themselves? If so, we have a narrative or literature about a state of affairs at the end of the 19th century. Or, does it mean that he is expressing a dominant value? If so, his utterance is more a statement or a source about the man at the time when he is writing.

This is another argument for the plausibility, when analysing the life stories, of alternately viewing them as narratives and statements. Reverting to the example already quoted, union consciousness may possibly have been high in the Nedertorneå crofter family in the 1890s. At the same time the informant gives this an air of self-confidence because he felt, at the time of writing in 1947, that he was expected to do so.

Facts or Values

Mats Rehnberg meant as follows concerning the collection of the autobiographies: The intention has been, not to call for exact particulars about hourly rates of pay, working hours, commodity prices etc., all of which can be verified much more efficiently from other sources. The aim has been to experience descriptions of everyday life, ways of life and human destinies in the industrial age.

Another Swedish professor of ethnology, Nils-Arvid Bringéus said: We can go elsewhere for the facts, but not for the subjective value.

This is the approach usually adopted by ethnologists. The greatest merit of the material is not as a corpus of facts but as chronological, class-related perspectives. But historians do not always view the material in these terms. Many exponents of oral history would like to see this material contrasted with other sources. The same type of interest in the veracity of the material is shown, for example, by the economic historian Bo Gustafsson in his book on sawmill workers in the north of Sweden, "Den norrlandska sågverksindustrins arbetare 1890–1914". In this opus, he compares the data supplied in the sawmill workers' autobiographies with available statistics, and he finds that the workers' information concerning such matters as working hours and rates of pay is relatively correct.

Selective Life Stories

Another problem regarding methods concerns the mechanisms governing the structure of life stories. There are three distinct reasons for the informant giving the life story a particular form:

A. People remember what, for private reasons, they want to remember (e.g. only "the pleasant parts").

B. People describe what they believe the reader wants to know (e.g. nothing but humorous anecdotes).

C. The questionnaire is designed in a particular way (just as an interviewer can ask particular questions and have a distinctive style).

Mikkelsen observes, concerning the collection of Danish working class autobiographies, that the wording of the questionnaires induced the workers to write about earlier times. In the case of Swedish printing workers' and sawmill workers' autobiographies, questions are certainly asked about their early years, but nothing like in proportion to the exhaustive detail in which these topics are described in the answers. Perhaps, quite simply, the informants themselves prefer to recall and write about earlier times, added to which they believe that this is in which their readers will be most interested.The museum's aura of being a historical institution can also carry more weight than the wording of the questionnaires. The informants may not believe that a museum can find the present very "interesting".

The conditioning mechanisms of the life stories are best analysed ad hoc. There is no universal explanation for the way they look, e.g. the structure of the questionnaire or powerful conviction concerning what the institution actually wants. The most important thing is for these life stories to have been critically scrutinised before being used.

The Representative Status of the Life Stories

Are the autobiographies representative of anybody but their authors? How universal are they? Do they exhibit any particular kind of bias, which is important to take into account? This could be such as a preponderance of town-dwellers, the informants having had more schooling or advanced further in their various jobs than others, and so on.

So-called "snowball strategy" involves collecting informants who, in turn, refer one to new informants, and so on and so forth, until "cognitive saturation" occurs, i.e. a point is reached at which further life stories serve only to confirm what is already known. Beartaux and Wiame believe themselves to have achieved this kind of saturation after analysing the autobiographies of 15 bakery workers and 30 master bakers. "Saturation" of this kind, however, cannot be judged solely in terms of the number of stories. The historian Edward Bull, for example, also inquires whether quality and unanimity are important factors in the assessment of representative status.

Summing up, workers' autobiographies may possibly be biased with respect to active trade unionism, and this should be borne in mind when using them. What is representative of this will then depend very much on the approach adopted by the individual researcher and the questions he has to ask. Representative status can be looked for on several planes, e.g. the geographical, social, age-related or sex-related. The number of life stories needing to be used is connected, for example, with the character of the investigation in hand. Have various types of sources been used, with the life stories serving to illustrate or confirm tendencies already known from other material? Or, are life stories the main source from which tendencies or contexts are to be analysed and identified?

Summing up, the life story conveys a more distinctly idealised image, profoundly influenced by the difficulties involved in expressing oneself in writing. But this in itself can invest the life stories with a special value. More or less overtly idealised images are worth studying, for example if one is interested in the culturally conditioned norms governing the way in which people like others to see them.

Analysing the Life Stories

The foremost purpose of the life stories, as seen Edward Bull, is that they arouse the imagination, indicate problems to be investigated, suggest hypotheses to be rerified.

The life stories are frequently regarded in these terms, i.e. primarily as a source of inspiration. But there are other approaches as well. Very simply, there are three possibilities:

A. Formulating problems and presenting hypotheses

B. Solving problems and responding to hypotheses

C. Illustrating problems and hypotheses solved/formulated previously

The boundaries between these three fields are flexible, but one can still safely say that A and C in particular have figured in discussions concerning the use of the life stories. There has been less question of the material also being useful in the terminal phase of analysis. Different methods of analysing life stories therefore need to be discussed more thoroughly.

In my own work, I have tried to combine a holistic approach with a quantitative approach resembling Bull's. Firstly, I have looked for key words, i.e. concepts that appear to be vitally important to the informants, and which recur frequently in the life stories. "Responsibility" and "interest" are words of this kind in the case of printing workers.

Secondly, I have looked for themes, i.e. certain subjects that appear to be of central importance and recur more frequently than others. These include, for example, stories concerning rites of initiation for young sawmill workers or the destructive influence of piece rates on the esprit de corps of food industry workers.

Thirdly, I look for general tendencies in the life stories, i.e. the basic attitude regarding different questions emerging from the life stories as a whole. This tendency is apparent not only from what people write, but also from what they do not write. One tendency, for example, is the way in which the printing workers describe a respectful attitude towards their employers, a different attitude, for example, than that of the sawmill workers. One interesting tendency, which sometimes appears among food industry workers, is that the elderly ones say how much easier work has been made by mechanisation, while the younger ones refer to the tedium of mechanised work.

Summary

Oral History is a wide-ranging concept, and in practice, the difference between an oral source and a written one is unclear. There is a more distinct line of demarcation between material written down by the collector/researcher and material written by the informant personally. This article deals with questions relating to the latter kind of material. Some of the observations made are as follows: