Paul Lazarsfeld
Encyclopedia
Paul Felix Lazarsfeld (February 13, 1901 – August 30, 1976) was one of the major figures in 20th-century American sociology
. The founder of Columbia University
's Bureau of Applied Social Research
, he exerted a tremendous 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."
analysis, panel methods, latent structure analysis, and contextual analysis. He is also considered a co-founder of mathematical sociology
. Many of his ideas have been so influential as to now be considered self-evident. He is also noted for developing the two-step flow of communication
model.
Lazarsfeld also made significant contributions by training many younger sociologists. One of Lazarsfeld's biographers, Paul Nerauth, writes that there are "dozens of books and hundreds of articles by his students and the students of his students, all of which still breathe the spirtit of this man's work". One of Lazarsfeld's successful students was Barney Glaser
- propounder of grounded theory
(GT) - the world's most quoted method for analyzing qualitative data. Index formations and qualitative mathematics were subjects taught by Lazarsfeld and are important components of the GT method according to Glaser. James Samuel Coleman, an important contributor to social theories of education and a future president of the American Sociological Association, was also a student of Lazarsfeld's at Columbia.
Lazarsfeld's other significant contributions consisted of constructing the institutions for academic sociology in the United States, including the "shop model" of collaborative research.
Paul Lazarsfeld has been the President of the American Sociological Association
(ASA) and the American Association for Public Opinion Research
. He has received honorary degrees from many universities, including University of Chicago, Columbia University, University of Vienna and Sorbonne University. Columbia University's social research center has been renamed after him. The career achievement award of the ASA Methodology section is also named in his honor.
(his doctoral dissertation dealt with mathematical aspects of Einstein's gravitational theory
). In the 1920s, he moved in the same circles as the Vienna Circle
of philosophers, including Otto Neurath
and Rudolf Carnap
. 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 1930–1931. 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 eds. 1971). He divorced Marie in 1934 and married his colleague Herta Herzog
, who divorced him in 1945.
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 Lazarsfel 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."
, 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 Neward 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 methods—mass 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 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.
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.
Lazarsfeld died in 1976. He had a son, Robert Lazarsfeld
, now a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan, who published Positivity in Algebraic Geometry (Springer) in 2004.
The ascendency of administrative research provided an effective foil for critics. Theodor W. Adorno
, who had worked under Lazarsfeld at the Radio Project, came to represent an intellectual tradition that contrasted with Lazarsfeld's own dedication to empiricism and willingness to collaborate with industry. Likewise, Lazarsfeld's focus on empirical discovery rather than grand theory ("abstract empiricism" in the words of C. Wright Mills
) was one of the spurs that led Robert K. Merton
to develop what he called "theories of the middle range."
In the end, he thought that his ideas of empirical research had not been as widely received as he might have hoped. In one of his last published papers, "Communication Research and Its Applications: A Postscript" (1976), Lazarsfeld lamented that the tide had turned against empirical research and that "while an increasing number of writers expressed the need [to make 'applications' a topic of research], it certainly was not the subject of popular demand among sociologists."
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
. The founder of Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
's Bureau of Applied Social Research
Bureau of Applied Social Research
The Bureau of Applied Social Research was a social research institute at Columbia University which specialised in mass communications research. It grew out of the Radio Research Project at Princeton University, beginning in 1937. The Bureau's first director was Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld...
, he exerted a tremendous influence over the techniques and the organization of social research
Social research
Social research refers to research conducted by social scientists. Social research methods may be divided into two broad categories:* Quantitative designs approach social phenomena through quantifiable evidence, and often rely on statistical analysis of many cases to create valid and reliable...
. "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."
Influence
Lazarsfeld's many contributions to sociological method have earned him the title of the "founder of modern empirical sociology". Lazarsfeld made great strides in statistical surveyStatistical survey
Survey methodology is the field that studies surveys, that is, the sample of individuals from a population with a view towards making statistical inferences about the population using the sample. Polls about public opinion, such as political beliefs, are reported in the news media in democracies....
analysis, panel methods, latent structure analysis, and contextual analysis. He is also considered a co-founder of mathematical sociology
Mathematical sociology
Mathematical sociology is the usage of mathematics to construct social theories. Mathematical sociology aims to take sociological theory, which is strong in intuitive content but weak from a formal point of view, and to express it in formal terms...
. Many of his ideas have been so influential as to now be considered self-evident. He is also noted for developing the two-step flow of communication
Two-step flow of communication
- Basic Overview :Also known as the Multistep Flow Model is a theory based on a 1940's study on social influence that states that media effects are indirectly established through the personal influence of opinion leaders...
model.
Lazarsfeld also made significant contributions by training many younger sociologists. One of Lazarsfeld's biographers, Paul Nerauth, writes that there are "dozens of books and hundreds of articles by his students and the students of his students, all of which still breathe the spirtit of this man's work". One of Lazarsfeld's successful students was Barney Glaser
Barney Glaser
Barney G. Glaser is an American sociologist and one of the founders of the grounded theory methodology.Glaser was born in San Francisco, California, and lives in Mill Valley. He received his BA degree at Stanford in 1952. He pursued academic studies at the University of Paris where he studied...
- propounder of grounded theory
Grounded theory
Grounded theory is a systematic methodology in the social sciences involving the generation of theory from data. It is mainly used in qualitative research, but is also applicable to quantitative data....
(GT) - the world's most quoted method for analyzing qualitative data. Index formations and qualitative mathematics were subjects taught by Lazarsfeld and are important components of the GT method according to Glaser. James Samuel Coleman, an important contributor to social theories of education and a future president of the American Sociological Association, was also a student of Lazarsfeld's at Columbia.
Lazarsfeld's other significant contributions consisted of constructing the institutions for academic sociology in the United States, including the "shop model" of collaborative research.
Paul Lazarsfeld has been the President of the American Sociological Association
American Sociological Association
The American Sociological Association , founded in 1905 as the American Sociological Society , is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the discipline and profession of sociology by serving sociologists in their work and promoting their contributions to serve society.The ASA holds its...
(ASA) and the American Association for Public Opinion Research
American Association for Public Opinion Research
The American Association for Public Opinion Research , founded in 1947, is an organization of approximately 1900 survey research professionals from academia, non-profit organizations, polling firms, and government...
. He has received honorary degrees from many universities, including University of Chicago, Columbia University, University of Vienna and Sorbonne University. Columbia University's social research center has been renamed after him. The career achievement award of the ASA Methodology section is also named in his honor.
Austria
Lazarsfeld was born to Jewish parents in Vienna, where he attended schools, eventually receiving a doctorate in mathematicsMathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
(his doctoral dissertation dealt with mathematical aspects of Einstein's gravitational theory
General relativity
General relativity or the general theory of relativity is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1916. It is the current description of gravitation in modern physics...
). In the 1920s, he moved in the same circles as the Vienna Circle
Vienna Circle
The Vienna Circle was an association of philosophers gathered around the University of Vienna in 1922, chaired by Moritz Schlick, also known as the Ernst Mach Society in honour of Ernst Mach...
of philosophers, including Otto Neurath
Otto Neurath
Otto Neurath was an Austrian philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist...
and Rudolf Carnap
Rudolf Carnap
Rudolf Carnap was an influential German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism....
. 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 1930–1931. In 1926 he married the sociologist Marie Jahoda
Marie Jahoda
Marie Jahoda was an Austrian- British social psychologist.-Biography:Jahoda was born in Vienna, Austria to a Jewish family, and like many other psychologists of her time, grew up in Austria where political oppression against socialists was rampant henceforward Dollfuß claimed power...
. 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 eds. 1971). He divorced Marie in 1934 and married his colleague Herta Herzog
Herta Herzog
Herta Herzog-Massing was an Austrian-American social scientist specializing in communication studies. Her most prominent contribution to the field, an article entitled "What Do We Really Know About Daytime Serial Listeners?", is considered a pioneering work of the uses-and-gratifications approach...
, who divorced him in 1945.
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 1933-1935, Lazarsfeld worked with the Federal Emergency Relief AdministrationFederal Emergency Relief Administration
Federal Emergency Relief Administration was the new name given by the Roosevelt Administration to the Emergency Relief Administration which President Herbert Hoover had created in 1932...
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
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
, translate an introduction to statistics Lazarsfel 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 AdministrationNational Youth Administration
The National Youth Administration was a New Deal agency in the United States that focused on providing work and education for Americans between the ages of 16 and 24. It operated from 1935 to 1939 as part of the Works Progress Administration . Following the passage of the Reorganization Act of...
, headquartered at the University of Newark
Rutgers-Newark
Rutgers University in Newark is one of three campuses of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, the eighth oldest college in the United States and a member of the Association of American Universities...
(now the Newark campus of Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
). 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 Neward 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
Mirra Komarovsky
Mirra Komarovsky , a pioneer in the sociology of gender.Coming from a privileged Jewish family in Czarist Russia, her family fled the country after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Komarovsky’s parents were Zionists and landowning Jews in Akkerman, Russia, until tsarist police drove them from their home...
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 methods—mass 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 Project
Radio Project
The Radio Project was a social research project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to look into the effects of mass media on society.In 1937, the Rockefeller Foundation started funding research to find the effects of new forms of mass media on society, especially radio...
, 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
Hadley Cantril
-Biography:Born in Utah, he was educated at Dartmouth College and received his Ph.D. from Harvard. He joined the faculty of Princeton in 1936 and later became chairman of Princeton University Department of Psychology...
and Frank Stanton
Frank Stanton
Frank Nicholas Stanton was an American broadcasting executive who served as the president of CBS between 1946 and 1971 and then vice chairman until 1973. He also served as the chairman of the Rand Corporation from 1961 until 1967.Along with William S. Paley, Stanton is credited with the...
, 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 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
Elihu Katz
Elihu Katz is an American and Israeli sociologist.-Biography:Katz has spent most of a lifetime in research on communication, his main focus being the interplay between media, conversation, opinion, and action in the public sphere...
, Lazarsfeld published Personal Influence, which propounded the theory of a two-step flow of communication
Two-step flow of communication
- Basic Overview :Also known as the Multistep Flow Model is a theory based on a 1940's study on social influence that states that media effects are indirectly established through the personal influence of opinion leaders...
, opinion leadership
Opinion leadership
Opinion leadership is a concept that arises out of the theory of two-step flow of communication propounded by Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz. This theory is one of several models that try to explain the diffusion of innovations, ideas, or commercial products....
, and of community as filters for the mass media. Along with Robert K. Merton
Robert K. Merton
Robert King Merton was a distinguished American sociologist. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor...
, he popularized the idea of a narcotizing dysfunction
Narcotizing Dysfunction
The term narcotizing dysfunction was first identified in the article Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action, by Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and Robert K. Merton.The term refers to a social consequence of mass media...
of media, along with its functional roles in society.
Lazarsfeld died in 1976. He had a son, Robert Lazarsfeld
Robert Lazarsfeld
Robert Kendall Lazarsfeld is an American mathematician, the Raymond L Wilder Collegiate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. He is the son of sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld...
, now a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan, who published Positivity in Algebraic Geometry (Springer) in 2004.
Criticism
A major portion of Lazarsfeld's research concerned the individual decision-making process and how it was influenced by the mass media. The Marienthal study was an exception, being biased toward the community, but in all the studies carried out in localities after Marienthal (Sandusky, Elmira, and Decatur, for example), the individual was much more clearly the unit of analysis. While Lazarsfeld clearly did not see his own research agenda as the only approach to communication research, others criticized his "administrative research"--paid for by commercial and military funding—as an overwhelming move toward empirical, short-term, effects-based research.The ascendency of administrative research provided an effective foil for critics. Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno was a German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist known for his critical theory of society....
, who had worked under Lazarsfeld at the Radio Project, came to represent an intellectual tradition that contrasted with Lazarsfeld's own dedication to empiricism and willingness to collaborate with industry. Likewise, Lazarsfeld's focus on empirical discovery rather than grand theory ("abstract empiricism" in the words of C. Wright Mills
C. Wright Mills
Charles Wright Mills was an American sociologist. Mills is best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination in which he lays out a view of the proper relationship between biography and history, theory and method in sociological scholarship...
) was one of the spurs that led Robert K. Merton
Robert K. Merton
Robert King Merton was a distinguished American sociologist. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor...
to develop what he called "theories of the middle range."
In the end, he thought that his ideas of empirical research had not been as widely received as he might have hoped. In one of his last published papers, "Communication Research and Its Applications: A Postscript" (1976), Lazarsfeld lamented that the tide had turned against empirical research and that "while an increasing number of writers expressed the need [to make 'applications' a topic of research], it certainly was not the subject of popular demand among sociologists."
See also
- Hindsight biasHindsight biasHindsight bias, or alternatively the knew-it-all-along effect and creeping determinism, is the inclination to see events that have already occurred as being more predictable than they were before they took place. It is a multifaceted phenomenon that can affect different stages of designs,...
- Statistical surveyStatistical surveySurvey methodology is the field that studies surveys, that is, the sample of individuals from a population with a view towards making statistical inferences about the population using the sample. Polls about public opinion, such as political beliefs, are reported in the news media in democracies....
- Public opinionPublic opinionPublic opinion is the aggregate of individual attitudes or beliefs held by the adult population. Public opinion can also be defined as the complex collection of opinions of many different people and the sum of all their views....
- Narcotizing DysfunctionNarcotizing DysfunctionThe term narcotizing dysfunction was first identified in the article Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action, by Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and Robert K. Merton.The term refers to a social consequence of mass media...
- Mathematical SociologyMathematical sociologyMathematical sociology is the usage of mathematics to construct social theories. Mathematical sociology aims to take sociological theory, which is strong in intuitive content but weak from a formal point of view, and to express it in formal terms...