Paul Felix Lazarsfeld (February 13, 1901August 30, 1976) was an Austrian-American sociologist and mathematician. The founder of Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research, he exerted influence over the techniques and the organization of social research. "It is not so much that he was an American sociologist," one colleague said of him after his death, "as it was that he determined what American sociology would be." Lazarsfeld said that his goal was "to produce Paul Lazarsfelds". He was a founding figure in 20th-century empirical sociology. He came to sociology through his expertise in mathematics and quantitative methods, participating in several early quantitative studies, including what was possibly the first scientific survey of radio listeners, in 19301931. In 1926 he married the sociologist Marie Jahoda. Together with Hans Zeisel they wrote a now-classical study of the social impact of unemployment on a small community: Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal (1932; English: The sociography of an unemployed community, 1971).

Coming to America

The Marienthal study attracted the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation, leading to a two-year traveling fellowship to the United States. From 1933 to 1935, Lazarsfeld worked with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and toured the United States, making contacts and visiting the few universities that had programs related to empirical social science research. It was during this time that Lazarsfeld met Luther Fry at the University of Rochester (which resulted in the inspiration for the research done in Personal Influence, written some twenty years later) and Robert S. Lynd, who had written the Middletown study. Lynd would come to play a central role in helping Lazarsfeld emigrate to the United States, and would recommend him for the directorships of the Newark Center and the Princeton Office of Radio Research. Lazarsfeld contacted the Psychological Corporation, a non-profit organization devoted to bringing the techniques of applied psychology to business, and proposed a number of projects that were rejected as not having enough commercial value or being too involved. He also helped John Jenkins, an applied psychologist at Cornell University, translate an introduction to statistics Lazarsfeld had written for his students in Vienna (Say It With Figures). Finally, he pursued research into the ideas presented in the widely read "The Art of Asking Why" (1935), which explained Lazarsfeld's concept of "reason analysis".

Newark

At the end of the fellowship in 1935, with a return to Vienna made untenable by the political climate, Lazarsfeld decided to remain in America, and secured an appointment as the director of student relief work for the National Youth Administration, headquartered at the University of Newark (now, the Newark campus of Rutgers University). A year later, he established an institute in Newark along the lines of his Vienna Research Center, institutionalizing the marginal field of opinion research that Lazarsfeld felt was his most important contribution. Lazarsfeld saw his institute as an important bridge between European and American models of research, and was willing to place the future of his institutes before his personal career. For example, in order to make the Newark Center seem to have a larger staff, Lazarsfeld published under a pseudonym. The Newark Center was clearly successful in generating interest in both empirical studies and in Lazarsfeld as a research manager. The research carried on at the center between 1935 and 1937 (including research for the Mirra Komarovsky book The Unemployed Man and His Family) demonstrated that empirical research could be of help and of interest to both business and academia. Under "Administrative Research", as he called his framework, a large, expert staff worked at a research center, deploying a battery of social-scientific investigative methodsmass market surveys, statistical analysis of data, focus group work, etc.to solve specific problems for specific clients. Funding came not only from the university, but also from commercial clients who contracted out research projects. This produced studies such as two long reports to the dairy industry on factors influencing the consumption of milk; and a questionnaire to let people assess whether they shop too much (for Cosmopolitan magazine).

While at Newark, Lazarsfeld was appointed head of the Princeton Office of the Radio Research Project, which was later moved to Columbia. In 1937, he first tried to have the project moved to Newark, and when that request was turned down, split his time between the project and his institute in Newark. He feared (correctly, perhaps) that the institute would fail without his management. At the Project, Lazarsfeld expanded the aims postulated by the assistant directors, Hadley Cantril and Frank Stanton, and in a special issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology in February 1939, edited by Lazarsfeld, he tied together some of the varied research the Project was engaged in. Lazarsfeld felt this publication was necessary because "no central theory was visible, and we began hearing rumors that important people questioned whether we knew what we were doing" (Lazarsfeld, 1969). But in the spring of 1939, the Rockefeller foundation officers were still unconvinced and "required more solid evidence of achievement" before they would renew funding. The result was Radio and the Printed Page. These two publications did much to consolidate and define the field of communication.

Columbia

After a falling out with Cantril, which may have been financial in nature, the Radio Research Project moved to Columbia University, where it grew into the acclaimed Bureau for Social Research. At Columbia, the direction of research leaned toward voting, and a study of the November 1940 vote was published as The People's Choice, a book that had a substantial effect on the nature of political research.

During the 1940s, mass communication entrenched itself as a field in its own right. Lazarsfeld's interest in the persuasive elements of mass media became a topic of great importance during the Second World War and this resulted in increased attention, and funding, for communication research. By the 1950s, there were increased concerns about the power of the mass media, and with Elihu Katz, Lazarsfeld published Personal Influence, which propounded the theory of a two-step flow of communication, opinion leadership, and of community as filters for the mass media. Along with Robert K. Merton, he popularized the idea of a narcotizing dysfunction of media, along with its functional roles in society.

His contributions include: the two-step flow of communication from media to opinion leaders and then others (multi-step flow theory); his research on the characteristics of opinion leaders; diffusion of medical innovations; uses and gratifications of receivers from day time radio soap operas, etc. His research led to a marriage between interpersonal communication and mass communication.

In 1956, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Lazarsfeld died in 1976. His mother Sophie survived him by almost a month, dying at age 95. With Marie Jahoda, he had a daughter, Lotte Franziska Lazarsfeld (born 1930), later Lotte Bailyn, who became a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He divorced Marie in 1930 and married his colleague Herta Herzog in 1936. The marriage lasted until 1945. With his third wife, married in 1949, , he had a son, Robert Lazarsfeld (born 1953), who was professor of mathematics at Stony Brook University, and who published Positivity in Algebraic Geometry (Springer) in 2004.

Influence

Lazarsfeld's many contributions to sociological method have earned him the title of the "founder of modern empirical sociology". Lazarsfeld invented the latent class model for clustering multivariate discrete data. He also made great strides in statistical survey analysis, panel methods, latent structure analysis, and contextual analysis. as is the top theory award of the American Evaluation Association.

Criticism

Though the research bureau was a major contribution, it was not without flaws. Lazarsfeld emphasized that a research institution is capable of existing in an organized fashion but that the commandeering and leadership really dictated the success of it. Lazarsfeld was successful for nearly two decades; however actors within this particular system could manipulate the machinations of the institution and thus derail the program. Another negative repercussion of having the type of leadership that Lazarsfeld provided was that the organization and its methodology was determined by his preferencesnot allowing in this case for statistics to be utilized and that the data sets were unable to be replicated and generalized. Apparently the pair had little contact until Merton and his wife came to dinner at the Lazarsfeld's Manhattan apartment on Saturday evening, November 23, 1941. Upon arrival Lazarsfeld explained to Merton that he had been just asked by the US government's Office of New Facts and Figures to evaluate a radio program. Thus "Merton accompanied Lazarsfeld to the radio studio, leaving their wives in the Lazarsfeld apartment with the uneaten dinner." Lazarsfeld and Merton set out to understand the burgeoning public interest in problems of the "media of mass communication". After a critical consideration of common and problematic approaches to the mass medianoting that the "sheer presence of these media may not affect our society so profoundly as is widely supposed"

Bibliography

  • Katz, Elihu, and Paul F. Lazarsfeld. Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1966.
  • Lazarsfeld, Paul F. Radio and the Printed Page: An Introduction to the Study of Radio and Its Role in the Communication of Ideas. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1940.
  • Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet. The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes up his Mind in a Presidential Campaign. New York: Columbia University Press, 1944.
  • Lazarsfeld, Paul F. "An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir." In The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn 270–337. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969.
  • Lazarsfeld, Paul F. and Robert K. Merton, "Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action", in L. Bryson (ed.), The Communication of Ideas. New York: Harper, 95–118. Reprinted in: John Durham Peters and Peter Simonson (eds), Mass Communication and American Social Thought: Key Texts, 1919–1968. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, pp. 230–241.
  • Lazarsfeld, Paul F. Qualitative Analysis; Historical and Critical Essays. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1972.

See also

  • Hindsight bias
  • Statistical survey
  • Public opinion
  • Two-step flow of communication

References

Sources

  • Hans Zeisel, "The Vienna Years," in Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research: Papers in honor of Paul F. Lazarsfeld, ed. Robert K. Merton, James S. Coleman, and Peter H. Rossi (New York: Free Press, 1979)
  • Simonson, Peter, and Weimann, Gabriel, "Critical Research at Columbia", in E. Katz, et al. (eds.), Canonic Texts in Media Research. Cambridge: Polity, 2003, pp. 12–38.
  • Paddy Scannell, "The End of the Masses: Merton, Lazarsfeld, Riesman, Katz, USA, 1940s and 1950", in his Media and Communication. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006, 62–90.
  • Wilbur Schramm, "The Beginnings of Communication Study in America: A Personal Memoir", ed. Steven H. Chaffee and Everett M. Rogers (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997).
  • Fürstenberg, Friedrich, "Knowledge and Action. Lazarsfeld's foundation of social research"; in: Paul Larzarsfeld (1901–1976). La sociologie de Vienne à New York (eds. Jacques Lautman & Bernard-Pierre Lécuyer); Paris-Montréal (Qc.): Éditions L'Harmattan, 423–432; online-Version: [http://www.hausarbeiten.de/faecher/hausarbeit/soc/24781.html]
  • Morrison, David Edward, Paul Lazarsfeld: The Biography of an Institutional Innovator Doctoral thesis, University of Leicester, 1976; online-version [https://lra.le.ac.uk/handle/2381/9093]
  • Garfinkel, Simson L. Radio Research, McCarthyism and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bachelor of Science Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1987; online-version [http://simson.net/clips/academic/1987.pfl_thesis_scan.pdf]
  • National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
  • Finding aid to the Paul Lazarfeld papers at Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library