Many historians remain sceptical of oral history and dismiss it because of which reason?

Uniqueness of personal experience makes generalisation difficult.

The correct answer is Option (3) → Uniqueness of personal experience makes gereralisation difficult.

Given options:

Option 1- It broadens the boundaries of their discipline.
Option 2- It enables historians to write vivid accounts of what happened.
Option 3- Uniqueness of personal experience makes generalisation difficult. (Answer)
Option 4- It has explored the experience of those men and women whose existence has been ignored.

Many historians still remain sceptical of oral history. They dismiss it because oral data seem to lack concreteness and the chronology they yield may be imprecise. Historians argue that the uniqueness of personal experience makes generalisation difficult: a large picture cannot be built from such micro-evidence, and one witness is no witness. They also think oral accounts are concerned with tangential issues, and that the small individual experiences which remain in memory are irrelevant to the unfolding of larger processes of history. However, with regard to events such as the Partition in India and the Holocaust in Germany, there is no dearth of testimony about the different forms of distress that numerous people faced. So, there is ample evidence to figure out trends, to point out exceptions. By comparing statements, oral or written, by corroborating what they yield with findings from other sources, and by being vigilant about internal contradictions, historians can weigh the reliability of a given piece of evidence. Furthermore, if history has to accord presence to the ordinary and powerless, then the oral history of Partition is not concerned with tangential matters. The experiences it relates are central to the story, so much so that oral sources should be used to check other sources and vice versa. Different types of sources have to be tapped for answering different types of questions. Government reports, for instance, will tell us of the number of “recovered” women exchanged by the Indian and Pakistani states but it is the women who will tell us about their suffering.