Paul F. Lazarsfeld Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Mathematically trained Paul Felix Lazarsfeld (1901–1976) was a leading empirical sociologist who is celebrated for his contribution to, in the words of Jonathan Cole in his 2004 keynote address at a symposium honoring Lazarsfeld, “scholarly revolutions that catapulted American research universities to positions of preeminence.”

Lazarsfeld was born in Vienna, Austria. He was an active academic and taught at a gymnasium. Lazarsfeld also helped establish a research institute at the University of Vienna, headed by German psychologist Karl Bühler. This would be the first of four institutes Lazarsfeld established in his lifetime. His position at the gymnasium came to an end in 1933 as the Nazi regime forced many Jewish academics from their positions.

After the loss of his post in Austria, Lazarsfeld went to the United States on a Rockefeller Foundation traveling fellowship after having attracted the foundation’s attention with a study on unemployment in an area close to Vienna. Lazarsfeld quickly became well established in the United States. By the end of the 1930s he had set up a research center at the University of Newark in New Jersey and became the director of the Office of Radio Research, working with sociologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno. In 1940, Lazarsfeld moved to New York and began to teach at Columbia University. The Office of Radio Research also relocated to Columbia University and became the Bureau of Applied Social Research, with Lazarsfeld still serving as its director. Eventually, he became president of the American Sociological Association and was elected to the American National Academy of Sciences.

Fascinated with methodology, Lazarsfeld is perhaps most known for combining qualitative and quantitative methods. He came up with the panel study or panel analysis, an innovative new way of surveying. By taking the same panel, or group of people, and interviewing them at intervals, Lazarsfeld found it was possible to identify changes in personal preference regarding any number of issues. Using this method, Lazarsfeld found that it was also possible to comment on the role of the media in influencing preference. The method was applied to a study of presidential election campaigns, and the results were published in The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign (1944) and Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (1954), both of which continue to be instrumental in the contemporary study of public opinion surveying and election polling.

Lazarsfeld’s research challenged the popular notion that society was composed of completely individual-minded and autonomous actors who were directly influenced by the media. His two-step flow of information model showed that opinion leaders were largely responsible for interpreting the flow of information from the media and diffusing it to larger societal groups.

The methods and ideas Lazarsfeld brought to the social sciences have continued to be influential since his death in 1976 from cancer. Tributes in the form of symposiums, conferences, and publications dedicated to his work are a testament to the value of the contribution he made to disciplines as diverse as mathematics, history, psychology, sociology, political science, and mass communications.

Bibliography:

Cole, Jonathan. Keynote address delivered at An International Symposium in Honor of Paul Lazarsfeld, Brussels, Belgium, June, 2004.
Coleman, James. “Paul Lazarsfeld: The Substance and Style of His Work.” In Sociological Traditions from Generation to Generation: Glimpses of the American Experience, edited by Robert Merton and Matilda White Riley, 153–175. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1980.
Jerábek, Hynek. “Paul Lazarsfeld—The Founder of Modern Empirical Sociology: A Research Biography.” International Journal of Public Opinion Research 13, no. 3 (2001): 229–244.
Lazarsfeld, Paul. “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir.” In Intellectual Migration: Europe and American 1930–1960, edited by Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, 270–337. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969.
Lazarsfeld, Paul, and Wagner Thielens Jr. The Academic Mind: Social Scientists in a Time of Crisis. New York: Arno, 1958.

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