Bias

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who were still living. Even these interviews could not
be viewed as 100% accurate. One example, is a geographic bias. The people
that were interviewed were only a very small portion of the millions of
freed slaves. Counting the number of slaves interviewed from each state,
it was discovered that there were only 155 interviews from black people
living in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky, which is
about 6% of the total number of published interviews. Twenty-three percent
of the southern slave population lived in those states. In these
statistics, the upper-south was unrepresented.

Another example would be the ages of the ex-slaves
interviewed. Two-thirds of them were over 80 years of age, leaving the
question of how accurate were their memories. Also, most of the
interviewees were under the age of 20 when they were slaves. Since the
conditions for children were not as harsh compared to adults, they might
have an optimistic view of ...

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