PhD Thesis - ResearchSpace@Auckland - The University of Auckland

the Health Department was often slow to reflect the changing views of ethnic
minorities within society and adapt their immunisation policies accordingly.
Methodology
One important methodology which adds significantly to shape and tone of my thesis
was that of oral history; in my case interviews with several generations of mothers
concerning the immunisation their children as well as a number of health
professionals. Historian Perry Blatz has argued that oral history has ‘long been one of
the most important tools of the public historian’. 31 Certainly for the history of child
immunisation it proved to be one of the most revealing tasks that was undertaken
during my research. My focus was quite specific as I wished to ascertain parental and
health professional views regarding immunisation and what they remembered about
immunising their children. These memories were influenced by events within their
own lives, for example, one mother’s traumatic birth experience and the effect of this
on her baby led her to question more medical intervention in the form of
immunisation at the age of three months. Her own remembered reaction to rubella
immunisation as a girl confirmed her decision not to immunise. 32 This experience
added weight to historian Michael Frisch’s argument that oral history can be ‘a
powerful tool for discovering, exploring, and evaluating the nature of the process of
historical memory – how they connect individual experience and its social context,
how the past becomes part of the present, and how people use it to interpret their lives
and the world around them’. 33 This mother’s experience with her own and her son’s
immunisation became the primary reason for her serious long-term interest in
vaccines, and resulted in her establishing an anti-immunisation group in New
Zealand.
The interpretation and analysis of the oral interviews involved comparing, contrasting
and questioning the stories and information received. Blatz has commented on the
31 P. K. Blatz, ‘Craftsmanship and Flexibility in Oral History: A Pluralistic Approach to Methodology
and Theory’, The Public Historian, 12, 4, p.7. Perry Blatz is an Associate Professor of History at
McAnuity College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts, Duquesne University, United States.
32 Interview with Hilary Butler, 12 December 2001.
33 M. Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History, Albany,
1990, p.188, from A. Thomson, ‘Fifty Years On: An International Perspective on Oral History’,
Journal of American History, 85, 2, 1998, p.586.
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