Biographical methods in migration research THEODOROS IOSIFIDES*

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 domi-nance and associated views of social reality. After an initial interest to bio-graphical methods, which followed the edition of ‘The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1919-1921) ’ by Thomas and Znaniecki (1958), bio-graphical and generally qualitative research methods gave way to empiri-cist-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). Empiricism reduces social reality to a series of observable and discrete, highly atomistic entities (events, behaviors etc), which may be allegedly categorized and measured with the use of ‘objective ’ quantitative methods by more or less ‘neutral ’ social scientists (Iosifides 2008). The purpose of this, is the discovery of empirical, ‘law like ’ regularities between variables