The Interview Archive "Youth in the 20th Century" at the POSOPA e.V.

Abstract

The first part of the contribution briefly describes POSOPA e.V., the organizing institution of the archives and its corpus of interviews. The POSOPA e.V. is a small non-profit organization, that has a specialized library for historical youth and socialization research. POSOPA e.V. also arranges interdisciplinary research touching on qualitative social research, historical pedagogics and historiography. Currently, the archives contains approximately 340 interviews with individuals, who were members of youth-organizations or were engaged in youth work or youth policy. The interviews were generated during various research projects since the early eighties. They were all carried out as narrative biographical interviews focused on the youth and adolescence period of the interviewees. The narrations approximately cover the time span from 1910 to the 1990s. Some possibilities and problems of physical long-term data-protection are discussed in the second part of the contribution, followed by some reflections concerning how to ensure accessability to the corpus of interviews. In conclusion, some suggestions are made on how to improve cooperation among institutions which are archiving qualitative biographical data. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0003103