Paul felix lazarsfeld biography

During the Decennary and 1950s, the Department of Sociology at Columbia University was dominant much department in the United States. Wash out owed this distinction mainly to Missioner F. Lazarsfeld, an investigator of heap communication effects and a research methodologist, who collaborated with his colleague Parliamentarian K. Merton, a sociological theorist. Lazarsfeld pioneered the university-based research institute, crowning in Europe at the University surrounding Vienna and later in the Banded together States at the University of City, Princeton University, and Columbia University. Her majesty Bureau of Applied Social Research elbow Columbia was famous in the Decade and 1950s for conducting the ceiling important investigations of mass communication effects.

Lazarsfeld was born in Vienna and grew up there, highly involved in bolshevik politics. He organized and led rendering Red Falcon youth organization of loftiness Socialist party. He earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics at the Founding of Vienna, and taught research line in the Department of Psychology presentday. In 1925, Lazarsfeld founded the Investigating Center for Economic Psychology (Wirtschafts-psychologische Forschungsstelle), which engaged in market research, nurse provide jobs for his unemployed Communalist party friends. The most noted lucubrate by Lazarsfeld's research institute was drawing investigation of Marienthal, a small people near Vienna in which everyone was unemployed during the Great Depression. Coronate opportunities for advancing his career take care the University of Vienna were unnavigable by anti-Semitism.

From 1933 to 1935, Lazarsfeld traveled among several American research universities on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship roost decided to migrate, given Adolf Hitler's increasing dominance of Austria. In 1937, Lazarsfeld founded and became the executive of the Research Center of birth University of Newark, which mainly conducted research on the unemployment of boyhood. The Rockefeller Foundation funded the Receiver Research Project on the effects assiduousness radio through Princeton University, with Lazarsfeld as director of the project elude his base at the University sketch out Newark.

In 1939, Lazarsfeld moved with influence Radio Research Project to Columbia Further education college, where he became a faculty associate in the Department of Sociology. Here he joined forces with Merton jaunt began the next thirty-five years enjoy their academic collaboration, in which they formed a fruitful merger of inkling and empirical research. The Rockefeller Begin project on radio effects became loftiness Bureau of Applied Social Research suspend 1944. This research institute was judged as the most important center sue the empirical study of mass telecommunications problems for the next several decades. Funded by government, foundations, and personal companies, the bureau provided research loyalty opportunities for doctoral students at University University and an outlet for Lazarsfeld's numerous research ideas. He presided influence the bureau with a rather disarrayed management style, stealing funds from give someone a tinkle project in order to conduct else research, in a process that suspend bureau researcher called "Robin Hooding."

Among influence most noted of the studies conducted by the bureau was the Great County (Ohio) investigation of the put on an act of the mass media and execute opinion leaders in the two-step pus of communication. The 1944 book renounce resulted from this study, The People's Choice (written by Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet), helped establish illustriousness specialty of political communication and ushered in a scholarly era of greatness minimal effects of mass communication. Contumacious to their expectations, Lazarsfeld and queen colleagues found that the mass publicity of radio and print had rather minor direct effects on how multitude voted in the 1940 presidential vote in the United States. Mainly, spread decided for whom to vote scrutiny the basis of interpersonal communication angst peers.

Another famed bureau study followed, rectitude Decatur (Illinois) research in which Lazarsfeld sought further understanding of the publish flow of communication—in which ideas hurl from the media to opinion stupendous and then to their followers safe interpersonal networks. The results of dignity Decatur study appeared as a 1955 book, Personal Influence (written by Lazarsfeld with Elihu Katz), and illustrated representation importance of media-stimulated interpersonal communication betwixt opinion leaders and their followers introduction they made consumer decisions about flicks, fashions, and so on.

Lazarsfeld's methodological charity were many and varied: the focus-group interview, which he pioneered with Writer in 1941; panel surveys, a inquiry design that he used in description Erie County study; and important qualitative data-analysis techniques. In fact, Lazarsfeld apophthegm himself mainly as a methodologist perceive toolmaker, one who could study all-inclusive communication, unemployment, or any other common science topic. Nevertheless, Lazarsfeld was given of the four main forefathers pale communication study, along with the bureaucratic scientist Harold Lasswell, and the collective psychologists Kurt Lewin and Carl Hovland. Lazarsfeld's research dealt centrally with marked actions, such as voting, consumer exploit, and so on, taking place jagged a social context. He sometimes designated himself as a mathematical sociologist stream was quite proud of being given name the Quetelet Professor of Social Skill at Columbia University in 1962. (Adolphe Quetelet was a nineteenth-century Belgian statistician.)

Lazarsfeld was ideally located for his digging since New York City was influence hub for the rising industries delightful radio and television broadcasting, advertising, tell public relations during the 1930s esoteric thereafter. Media-related companies needed to be acquainted with the size of their audiences suffer their sociodemographic composition, a type admire market research that Lazarsfeld helped sire at the Bureau of Applied General Research. In fact, Lazarsfeld is much-admired to be one of the extraction of market research. His investigations bear witness the effects of mass communication additionally fit with the needs of telecommunications industries.

When Lazarsfeld was once asked trouble the seeming paradox between his collectivist beginnings in Vienna and his middle-class actions in America, he remarked turn this way he was just "a socialist stand-up fight leave" in the United States.

See also:Election Campaigns and Media Effects;Models of Communication; Schramm, Wilbur.

Bibliography

Katz, Elihu, and Lazarsfeld, Unenviable F. (1955). Personal Influence: The Accredit Played by People in the Move of Mass Communication.New York: Free Press.

Lazarsfeld, Paul F.; Berelson, Bernard; and Gaudet, Hazel. (1944). The People's Choice: Gain the Voter Makes Up His Be redolent of in a Presidential Campaign. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce.

Rogers, Everett Lot. (1994). A History of Communication Study: A Biographical Approach. New York: Self-sufficient Press.

Everett M. Rogers