Oral-History Interview Planner
Enter your planned interview length and get a time budget across five standard oral-history sections, plus a suggested number of questions for each.
Session plan — 20 suggested questions
How the plan is built
The planner splits your total interview time across five sections — Warm-Up & Consent, Early Life & Background, Formative Events, Turning Points & Relationships, and Reflections & Legacy — using fixed percentages that reflect where oral-history interviews typically spend their time. The same largest-remainder apportionment used elsewhere on the site keeps every section’s minutes a whole number that always sums back to your total.
From there, dividing each section’s minutes by how long you expect one question (plus follow-ups) to take gives a rough question count — useful for sketching a question list ahead of time without over- or under-preparing for any one part of the conversation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the warm-up section get the least time?
It's doing important work even though it's brief — settling nerves, confirming consent to record, and easing into conversation — but it isn't where the substance of the interview lives, so it's budgeted as a smaller share than the sections that draw out actual memories and reflection.
Why do Early Life and Formative Events get the biggest shares?
In most oral-history practice, the richest material comes from concrete, specific memories — a childhood home, a first job, a defining event — rather than from abstract questions asked too early or too late. Giving those two sections the largest time blocks reflects where most interviews naturally generate their best material.
How is the suggested question count worked out?
Each section's minutes are divided by the minutes you expect a single question to take once follow-ups are included, then rounded down — so a 23-minute section at 4 minutes per question suggests roughly 5 questions, leaving a little slack rather than overpacking the section.
Should I stick rigidly to this schedule during the interview?
Treat it as a planning budget you prepare with, not a stopwatch you run during the conversation. The best oral-history interviews follow where a memory leads — if the early-life section runs long because it's producing something valuable, let it, and trim elsewhere rather than cutting a good answer short to stay on schedule.
Planning aid only, not a substitute for formal oral-history training or an institution's consent and archiving requirements — always get clear recording consent before an interview begins.