Paul Lazarsfeld

Lore & Background

Lazarsfeld was born to Jewish parents in Vienna; his mother was Adlerian therapist Sophie Lazarsfeld, and his father Robert was a lawyer. He attended the University of Vienna, receiving a doctorate in mathematics in 1925; his dissertation dealt with mathematical aspects of Einstein's gravitational theory. In the 1920s he moved in the same circles as the Vienna Circle, including Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap, and served as a socialist activist. He came to sociology through his expertise in mathematics and quantitative methods, participating in early quantitative studies including what was possibly the first scientific survey of radio listeners in 1930–1931. In 1926 he married sociologist Marie Jahoda; with Hans Zeisel they wrote Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal (1932), a classical study of unemployment's social impact on a small community.

The Marienthal study attracted the Rockefeller Foundation, leading to a two-year traveling fellowship to the United States from 1933 to 1935. During this time he worked with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, met Luther Fry at the University of Rochester and Robert S. Lynd, who helped him emigrate. He contacted the Psychological Corporation and proposed projects that were rejected as lacking commercial value. He also helped John Jenkins translate an introduction to statistics he had written in Vienna (Say It With Figures), and pursued research into 'The Art of Asking Why' (1935), which explained his concept of 'reason analysis.' At the end of the fellowship, with return to Vienna untenable, he remained in America and secured an appointment as director of student relief work for the National Youth Administration at the University of Newark. In 1936 he established an institute in Newark along the lines of his Vienna Research Center, institutionalizing opinion research. To make the Newark Center seem to have a larger staff, he published under a pseudonym. Research there included work for Mirra Komarovsky's The Unemployed Man and His Family, and studies for the dairy industry and Cosmopolitan magazine.

While at Newark, Lazarsfeld was appointed head of the Princeton Office of the Radio Research Project, later moved to Columbia. After a falling out with Hadley Cantril, the Project moved to Columbia University, growing into the Bureau for Social Research. Research there leaned toward voting, and a study of the November 1940 vote was published as The People's Choice. In the 1940s, mass communication entrenched itself as a field; Lazarsfeld's interest in persuasive elements of mass media became important during the Second World War. By the 1950s, with Elihu Katz, he published Personal Influence, propounding the two-step flow of communication and opinion leadership. With Robert K. Merton, he popularized the idea of a narcotizing dysfunction of media. He was elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1956. Lazarsfeld died in 1976; his mother Sophie survived him by almost a month. He had a daughter, Lotte Franziska Lazarsfeld (later Lotte Bailyn), with Marie Jahoda, and a son, Robert Lazarsfeld, with third wife Patricia Kendall.

Reader's Guide

Lazarsfeld's significance lies in his foundational role in 20th-century empirical sociology. He invented the latent class model for clustering multivariate discrete data and made advances in statistical survey analysis, panel methods, latent structure analysis, and contextual analysis. He is considered a co-founder of mathematical sociology. His development of the two-step flow of communication model—from media to opinion leaders to others—and his work on opinion leadership, diffusion of medical innovations, and uses and gratifications of media receivers helped marry interpersonal and mass communication. Many of his ideas have become so influential as to be considered self-evident. He also trained many younger sociologists; one biographer, Paul Neurath, writes that there are 'dozen' (the article cuts off). Lazarsfeld's approach to 'Administrative Research'—using a large expert staff and multiple methods to solve problems for clients—helped institutionalize opinion research and bridge European and American research models. His legacy includes the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia and a lasting impact on how sociology is practiced.

Did You Know?

• Lazarsfeld's doctoral dissertation dealt with mathematical aspects of Einstein's gravitational theory.
• He possibly conducted the first scientific survey of radio listeners in 1930–1931.
• To make his Newark Center seem to have a larger staff, he published under a pseudonym.
• He was elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1956.