Paul Lazarsfeld

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.

Lazarsfeld was born to Jewish parents in Vienna: his mother was the Adlerian therapist Sophie Lazarsfeld, and his father Robert was a lawyer.

In the 1920s, he moved in the same circles as the Vienna Circle of philosophers, including Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap, and served as a "socialist activist".

He attended the University of Vienna, eventually receiving a doctorate in mathematics (his doctoral dissertation dealt with mathematical aspects of Einstein's gravitational theory) in 1925.

In 1926 he married the sociologist Marie Jahoda.

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.

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).

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".

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.

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.

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.

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).