by Julia Ruolan Ma
Abstract
Oral history interviews contain rich information about how individuals understand their experiences, but their length and complexity have limited their use in empirical research. I develop episodic interview analysis, a framework that segments each interview into thematic episodes at natural transition points, constructing six composite indices capturing both what narrators talk about and how they deliver it. I apply this to the murder of George Floyd as a natural experiment, comparing 1,003 race-tagged StoryCorps interviews against 964 family-tagged controls recorded between 2017 and 2023 in a difference-in-differences design. Racial storytelling shifted substantially toward institutional and reflective framing, with Structural Scope and Interpretiveness both surviving Benjamini-Hochberg correction. These shifts are uniform across narrator race, age, relationship type, and region. Heterogeneity lies in secondary dimensions: Black narrators respond through sustained emotional activation consistent with a confirmation effect, while White narrators show the structural shift without emotional engagement, consistent with constructing a new framework. Stranger conversations are more emotionally charged than family ones, and older narrators uniquely reorient toward present-tense storytelling. Within-interview analysis reveals how these shifts operate: narrators move more quickly from personal stories toward systemic framing and dwell longer in reflective states. Exploratory extensions show that state-level narrative shifts predict civic behaviors existing surveys cannot, and that emotional arcs vary systematically by narrator traits and conversational context. The framework generally applies to any setting where interview data can inform economic questions.
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Bocar A. Ba, Faculty Advisor
Michelle P. Connolly, Faculty Advisor
