Editorial: Biographical methods in migration research

Abstract

During the last decades, qualitative biographical/narrative methods gained a prominent position within the spectrum of social science methodology and research practice, mainly due to a reaction to the positivist-empiricist dominance and associated views of social reality. After an initial interest to biographical methods, which followed the edition of ‘The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1919-1921)’ by Thomas and Znaniecki (1958), biographical and generally qualitative research methods gave way to empiricist-quantitative approaches and only since the end of 1960 the positivist domination begun to be unsettled (Halfacree and Boyle 1993; Findlay and Li 1997; Tsiolis 2006).