Storytelling as oral history: revealing the changing experience of home heating in England

Oral history provides a means of understanding heating behaviour through encouraging respondents to articulate the past in terms of stories. Unlike other qualitative methods, oral history foregrounds the ontology of personal experiences in a way that is well suited to revealing previously undocumented phenomena in the private world of the home. Three types of change may be distinguished: long term historical change, change associated with the life-cycle stage of the individual and sudden change. A sample of eight in-depth interviews is used to demonstrate the potential of oral history in the study of home heating. The themes to emerge from the interviews include early memories of the home, the financial struggle to heat the home, the influence of childhood experiences in adulthood and the association between warmth and comfort. For the future, domestic comfort, energy conservation and carbon reduction need to be reconciled with one another.