The use of biographical material in intellectual history: writing about Alva and Gunnar Myrdal's contribution to sociology

Abstract

This paper addresses issues in the use of biographical materials in writing about the contribution about Alva and Gunnar Myrdal to the history of sociology and of research methods. After presenting a brief summary about the Myrdals' sociological research works and the biographical material available about them, the paper discusses a series of methodological dilemmas facing the biographical researcher, dilemmas identified by methodologists writing at the time of the Myrdals' own major period of sociologically informed research during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and by more recent debates in history on the impact of postmodernist approaches to evidence. The paper argues that the use of biographical material as evidence in intellectual history, and elsewhere, needs to be guided by the same principles of the search for validity and representativeness as in other areas of social research, even though the frameworks of relevance chosen in the process of interpretation may be set by contemporary concerns.

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