Paul Lazarsfeld and the Origins of Communications Research

Hynek Jeřábek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315533834
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The manuscript discusses the early days of communication research, explicitly the first works of Paul Lazarsfeld's radio and media research in Vienna, Newark, NJ, Princeton and New York during the years between the early 1930s, and the end of the 1940s. Lazarsfeld's Viennese radio research, especially the world's first extensive audience research – RAVAG study (1931) – is entirely new information for English speaking scholars. The book shows the details of Lazarsfeld's methodological reasoning in his projects in the field of communication. The book also presents the research institutes that Lazarsfeld founded in Vienna in 1931, from Newark Center in New Jersey (1935) to Princeton Office of Radio Research in 1937, and up to the foundation of Lazarsfeld's famous BASR at Columbia University in New York in the 1940s. The monograph shows how important Lazarsfeld's first studies were for the future development of communication.

1The context of Lazarsfeld’s communication studies

1.1Paul Lazarsfeld’s life story

Paul Felix Lazarsfeld was born in Vienna on 13 February 1901. He grew up in the city’s intellectual circles, influenced by Viennese thinkers and the local socialist movement. He studied mathematics at university, graduating in 1925, and then went on to study psychology under Karl and Charlotta Bühler. In the late 1920s, he and a group of students at the University of Vienna began conducting market research in the field of applied social psychology; he also trained students at the University of Vienna and conducted market research commissioned by businesses and industries in Austria and later abroad. Lazarsfeld obtained some of the funding for his research activities from the Rockefeller Foundation and the funds were managed by the Bühlers. At that time he was also teaching mathematics at a secondary school and working as an assistant to Charlotta Bühler, while also informally supervising the thesis work of students of psychology at the university.¹

Lazarsfeld began to produce his first research studies in the late 1920s, among them Jugend und Beruf (Youth and Occupations) [1931 (1975)] and Statistisches Praktikum für Psychologen und Lehrer (Statistical Praxis for Psychologists and Teachers) [1929]. In the winter of 1931/1932, he conducted his first large, and successful, statistical analysis of data from a broad survey of listeners to broadcasts of the Radio Communication Company in Vienna (Radio-Verkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft or RAVAG). For this survey he used questionnaires completed by more than 100,000 respondents. Paul Lazarsfeld founded his first research institute Research Centre for Economic Psychology (Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle) in 1931. This was one of the first research centres in Europe at that time.²

The Vienna Research Centre for Economic Psychology’s most famous study, however, was the one it conducted among the unemployed population in the town of Marienthal in Lower Austria. Titled Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal (The Unemployed in Marienthal), the study was first published in the summer of 1933 in Leipzig as a joint monograph produced by the research institute’s staff under the supervision of Professor Karl Bühler. The study is a prime example of collective work by an enthusiastic team. Paul Lazarsfeld, Marie Jahoda (his first wife) and Hans Zeisel are today known as the authors of this monograph [Jahoda, Lazarsfeld and Zeisel 1933 (1974)]. Today we can thank each of them, as well as many other members of the institute’s research team, for providing us with one of the nicest examples of mixed-methods research in a single social study.

In 1932 Lazarsfeld appeared in Kopenhagen at the International Psychology Congress to speak about this study, but only one year later the effects of political developments in Europe at that time began to have an impact on his academic career. In the autumn of 1933, Lazarsfeld went to the United States, his initial plan being to stay there for one year on a fellowship funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. He extended his stay in 1934. In the summer of 1935, when a totalitarian regime assumed power in Austria and the socialists were outlawed, he applied for an emigration visa in Austria and moved for good to the United States.

Lazarsfeld was very active during his first visit to the United States on a fellowship between 1933 and 1935. He visited more than a dozen academic and commercial institutions and engaged in empirical social research; it was then that he first met Robert Lynd, Rensis Likert, Hadley Cantril and Frank Stanton and first worked with Arthur Kornhauser and David Craig on market research. He resided for a time in Chicago and visited universities, some statistical offices and research groups around the United States. Robert Lynd helped Lazarsfeld during his first years as an immigrant and would do so again later on numerous occasions. Lynd got Lazarsfeld his first job as a statistical analyst, analysing data from 10,000 questionnaires completed by young people in the state of New Jersey on their choice of occupation, a task that no one else wanted to do. Lazarsfeld took on the task and he and Frank Kingdom, the president of the little-known, recently founded Newark University, together agreed to found Lazarsfeld’s second research institute – The Newark University Research Center. The university provided the workspace and Lazarsfeld taught students at the institute and took on poorly remunerated teaching duties at Newark University. He got married again, this time to Herta Herzog, a former student from Vienna and an émigré; she would go on to collaborate with him on his work for many years.

For its first year, Lazarsfeld obtained auxiliary funding for the Newark University Research Center from Max Horkheimer, who had just recently moved his research team from Frankfurt to New York. Lazarsfeld also began working with Samuel A. Stouffer and Mirra Komarovsky to study the effects of the Great Depression on marriage and the family and was conducting market research with Arthur Kornhauser. He also wrote a useful article with Rowena Wyant analysing data on the sales rates of twenty-five major magazines in ninety US towns.

In 1937, Lazarsfeld, by then an experienced researcher, became the head of a large research project on radio broadcasting and listenerships. The deputies on this project, which became known among social scientists as the ‘Princeton Radio Project’, were Frank Stanton, head of CBS Radio Research Department, and Hadley Cantril, a famous psychologist from Princeton University. For Lazarsfeld this represented an opportunity to embark on a wide array of different research activities and he then founded his third research centre, the Princeton Office of Radio Research, this time under significantly better material conditions. At Lazarsfeld’s behest it initially made its base in Newark, where his existing research team was working.

In 1939, at Robert Lynd’s request and with Lazarsfeld’s full agreement, the Princeton Office of Radio Research moved to Columbia University in New York, which in those days was the centre of the radio broadcasting business. The office expanded its interests to cover other research topics and in 1945 it was renamed the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR). This was the fourth research institute founded and headed by Paul Lazarsfeld and it would go on to become a renowned institution, surviving until 1977 and only closing after Lazarsfeld’s death. In the meantime, in many locations around the United States dozens if not hundreds of similar research centres were being founded by Lazarsfeld’s former students. Research centres began to emerge around Europe that were based on Lazarsfeld’s verified model of a research institution, such as the Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach (Allensbach Institute), founded by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann in 1949 in Allensbach in west Germany; others were set up with his input, such as the research centres in Oslo (1946–47) and Vienna (1949).

Presidential elections were held in the United States in 1940 and for the first time radio broadcasting began to play a stronger role in the pre-election campaign. Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet wanted to study this process and the role of the media and other factors in it. They were not particularly interested in whether Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt or Republican Wendell Willkie won the election; they wanted to use the ‘panel method’ (a research method they perfected in this study) to examine how people decide who to vote for and how the decision-making process is influenced by the press and radio, family tradition, social background and even religious orientation and the contradictory influences voters are subjected to. The outcome of this four-year study was The People’s Choice [Lazarsfeld 1944], one of the most famous, most published and most translated of Lazarsfeld’s books.

During the Second World War Lazarsfeld worked as a methodological consultant on Stouffer’s team doing research for the US military. In 1949 the first two volumes of the American Soldier Study were published and Lazarsfeld wrote a review of the study [Stouffer et al. 1949; Lazarsfeld 1949]. In 1950, he and the other methodologists on the team published the fourth volume of the American Soldier Study, today known and cited under the title Studies in Social Psychology in World War II: Measurement and Prediction [Stouffer et al. 1950]. Half a year later, he and Merton published what was in a sense a fifth volume of the American Soldier Study entitled Continuities in Social Research: Studies in the Scope and Method of ‘The American Soldier’ [1950 (1974)] and this collection of critical writings represented the intellectual fruit of Stouffer, Merton and Lazarsfeld’s theoretical and methodological workshop.

Lazarsfeld’s academic career at Columbia University began with the 1939 radio research project, when he also began teaching at that school. In 1940 he became an associate professor and that year also marked the start of Lazarsfeld’s firm and official integration into the field of sociology. In the 1930s he had described himself as a psychologist and later as a social psychologist. At Columbia he and Merton were welcomed into the Department of Sociology, headed at that time by Robert Lynd, and in the years that followed collaboration between the outstanding empiricist and brilliant theorist brought glory to the Columbia school of sociology, produced successful students and gave rise to an almost model example of symbiosis between these two fundamental sides of sociological research. In 1962, Lazarsfeld was awarded the title of Quetelet Professor of Social Sciences, named in honour of Adolph Quetelet, the famous natural and social scientist, Belgian statistician and astronomer and, according to Lazarsfeld, the ‘founder of sociology’.

Lazarsfeld’s work on the development of methodology peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. He became one of the founders of mathematical sociology. In 1954, the scientific conference he headed at Columbia University, and which he invited an array of top experts to join, produced the first of a series of important works in this branch of sociology, namely Mathematical Thinking in the Social Sciences. Twenty years later, in 1966, he and Neil Henry edited an equally famous textbook titled Readings in Mathematical Social Science.

One of the methodological issues that Lazarsfeld came to be most famously associated with is latent variable analysis. He began work on this subject in the 1940s, initially terming it ‘latent attribute analysis’, then ‘latent variable analysis’, before finally settling on ‘latent structure analysis’. In 1968, after co-authoring a number of studies and articles, he and Neil Henry published the monograph Latent Structure Analysis, summarising their many years of research on this subject. There was a change in his personal life at this time: after divorcing Herta Herzog he married his assistant and colleague Patricia L. Kendall.

Throughout his life, Lazarsfeld’s goal was to establish an institution and system for educating sociologists and professional researchers at the doctoral level, but he never managed to bring this idea to complete fruition. In 1955, he and Morris Rosenberg published one of the most famous textbooks for teaching sociological methodology, The Language of Social Research. In the United States and in many countries in Europe, this book introduced the methodological paradigm for academic sociology to an entire generation of American and European sociologists. In 1972 he, Morris Rosenberg and Ann K. Pasanella published a no less successful sequel to this methodological textbook entitled Continuities in the Language of Social Research. In France, three volumes of similar but not identical symposia, Méthodes de la sociologie, were published in co-editorship with Raymond Boudon [Lazarsfeld and Boudon 1965, 1966, 1970].

Meanwhile, Lazarsfeld also continued to be active in the field of meritorious research. In 1955, he and Elihu Katz published Personal Influence, which deservedly sparked interest in the academic community for its hypothesis about the ‘two-step flow of communication’ (i.e. communication flows first from the mass media to opinion leaders, who are actively interested in obtaining information and seek it out, and subsequently from them to other citizens), first postulated in The People’s Choice [1944]. He and his assistant tested the hypothesis on new empirical material in four areas in which women often sought advice: fashion, movie-going, issues of public concern and an orientation in the market in goods.

During the era of McCarthyism, when tens of thousands of people were accused of un-American activities, Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens decided to conduct a study among the academic community, university teachers and researchers and social scientists. This led in 1958 to the publication of Lazarsfeld’s next famous book, The Academic Mind.

The final years of Lazarsfeld’s scientific career are associated with his development of a concept for integrating sociological findings into decision-making processes in society. Lazarsfeld co-authored two influential books on the applications of sociology in various spheres of social praxis: The Uses of Sociology [1967] and An Introduction to Applied Sociology [1975]. He also concentred extensively on another branch of sociology, the history of empirical social research (but never published a monograph on this subject). In the 1930s, he inspired his friend Hans Zeisel to to write a brief history of sociography, which was then published as a supplement to Marienthal [1933 (1974)]. In 1961 he published ‘Notes on the History of Quantification in Sociology: Trends, Sources and Problems’, which concisely covers the full breadth of this subject. He also expressed his opinions on this subject in a number of articles and papers, most of them written in the 1960s. He co-authored two important studies with his doctoral students, one on Max Weber with Anthony Oberschall in 1965 [Lazarsfeld and Oberschall 1965], enriching his portrait with examples of significant efforts in the field of academic empirical social research between 1907 and 1912, and the second with David Landau in 1968 on Adolphe Quetelet [Lazarsfeld and Landau 1968], not hesitating to equate the latter’s significance for the early stages of sociology with that of Auguste Comte. The progress Lazarsfeld made in the field of the history of empirical social research was carried on by his younger colleagues Anthony Obershall and Susanne Schad and left its legacy in their publications.

Paul Lazarsfeld worked at Columbia University until he retired in 1971. He was the director of BASR from 1953 to 1962 and head of the Department of Sociology from 1968 to 1969. In 1946, he spent one semester in Oslo; in 1954/1955, a year in Palo Alto, California; in 1959/1960, he was at Harvard; and in 1962/1963 and 1967/1968, at the Sorbonne in Paris. After retiring and almost up until his death, he continued to teach under the title of Distinguished Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He received several awards for his services to the advancement of the field of sociology. In 1950, he was elected chair of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), while in 1954 he was the first recipient of AAPOR’s Woodward Award. In 1962, he became the chair of the American Sociological Association (ASA). He also received honorary doctorates from many universities: from Yeshiva University in Jerusalem in 1965; from the University of Chicago in 1966; from Columbia University in 1970; and from the University of Vienna in 1971. He was the first American to receive an honorary doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1969, Austria awarded him the Cross of Honour for Science and Art.

He founded or contributed to the establishment of several branches of sociological research: unemployment research; communication research; research on the formation of voter preferences and electoral behaviour; and the sociology of science and the academic community. In sociological methodology, he is known as the inventor of latent structure analysis and was the first to formulate and help solve the problem of the sixteen-fold table and other problems directly connected with panel analysis. He was the first to describe the problem of false correlations and he was instrumental in the development of mathematical sociology, theoretically describing, applying and advancing the development of analytical tools with which to research questions in this field. On the level of academic social research, he asserted wide use of the ‘survey research’ model based on sample surveys and multidimensional analyses.

But Lazarsfeld’s greatest contribution to the advancement of sociology involved an activity that he worked on for fifty years of his active career as a scientist, from the time he began working as an assistant and an unofficial teacher at the University of Vienna in the late 1920s until his death on 30 August 1976 in New York; this was his tireless work as an educator exercised through his single-minded efforts to establish the institutional foundations of social research. He contributed to the formation of hundreds of social researchers and countless talented teachers. He worked daily with his doctoral students, assistants and younger colleagues on trying to solve various research questions. He taught them the work of sociology so well that they in turn went on to train subsequent generations of sociologists. Lazarsfeld’s concept of the ‘sociological workshop’, where he worked with other colleagues, constituted a fundamental contribution to research work. Whether it was in Vienna, Newark, New York, Palo Alto, Paris or Oslo, the adventure of learning always came first for him. In short, Lazarsfeld was the co-founder of the modern form of the field of sociology, with its emphasis on empirical research and its equal respect for theoretical principles and outcomes. It is no exaggeration to say that sociology has Lazarsfeld to thank for many of its current features. Just as we cannot imagine the theoretical side of sociology without the contributions of Max Weber, Emil Durkheim, Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies or Vilfredo Pareto, the empirical side of social research owes much to Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his activities, which played an instrumental role in the institutional establishment of social research.

1.2The social context of Lazarsfeld’s life and work in Vienna

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Endrosement
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword to the English edition 2017
• Introduction
• 1 The context of Lazarsfeld’s communication studies
• 2 Lazarsfeld’s first ‘communication studies’
• 3 The Princeton years of radio research
• 4 The radio research yearbooks
during World War 2
• 5 Two major studies by Paul Lazarsfeld’s colleagues
• 6 Representative studies of radio listeners
• 7 The birth of communication research
• 8 Lazarsfeld’s communication 
research: Its credo and its contribution 
to sociology
• Summary
• References
• Notes
• Index