P a u l F . L a z a r s f e l d 1901—1976 A Biographical 2

CAREER IN THE UNITED STATES
Lazarsfeld first came to the United States in September
1933 as a Rockefeller fellow; he spent the academic year
1933-34 visiting universities, New Deal agencies, and market
research firms. In most places he tried to learn by attaching
himself to one or more research projects. With the enthusiasm,
energy, hard work, and imagination that characterized
his entire career, he sent a questionnaire to the eight other
European fellows in his group to learn how they had adjusted
to life in the United States.
At the end of the second year of his fellowship, Lazarsfeld
decided to remain in the United States. The deteriorating
political situation in Austria following the defeat of the Social
Democrats in the civil war of February 1934 had made his
return to the University of Vienna impossible; the Forschungsstelle
was in the same deficit state he had left it in two
years earlier; and his marriage to Marie Jahoda—who had
remained in Vienna with their daughter—had ended. So he
accepted the job of analyzing some 10,000 questionnaires
from young people that had been collected by the New Jersey
Relief Administration. Lazarsfeld soon transformed the project
into the University of Newark Research Center, and became
the director.
The Center survived its first year by carrying out studies
for the public school system, the Works Progress Administration,
and the Frankfort Institute for Social Research—
then in exile. Located on the fringes of a small university,
with only a handful of staff, its abiding meaning is that it
was for Lazarsfeld the American rebirth of his Vienna Forschungsstelle.
The Princeton Radio Project. In 1937 the Rockefeller Foundation
granted funds to Hadley Cantril, a Princeton psychologist,
for a large-scale study of the social effects of radio.
On the recommendation of Robert Lynd, Lazarsfeld was chosen to be director. Cantril and Frank Stanton, then research
director, and later president of the Columbia Broadcasting
System, were appointed associate directors, and a broad
study of radio programming, radio audiences, and the preferences
of radio listeners was begun. The emphasis was on
the secondary analysis of existing survey data; the content
analysis of programs; and the use of the Lazarsfeld-Stanton
Program Analyzer, a jointly developed device for recording
the instantaneous likes and dislikes of experimental audiences,
following the prototype developed at the Forschungsstelle
in Vienna.
The L>.zarsfeld radio research project virtually created
the field of mass communications research. It asked why messages
are introduced into the media and why people attend
to them; that is, what gratifications or rewards people get
from the media and what functions the media serve in their
lives. Herta Herzog's studies of the audiences of daytime radio
soap operas and (with Hadley Cantril) of the radio listeners
who believed the famous 1938 Orson Welles broadcast of
an invasion from Mars are examples, as are the studies of
T. W. Adorno on the social roles of popular and serious music.
Other communications research projects carried out by
Lazarsfeld's associates are Bernard Berelson's study of "What
'Missing the Newspaper' Means," which used the occasion of
a 1945 newspaper strike in New York City to ascertain the
functions that newspapers serve in the lives of their readers,
and Leo Lowenthal's 1944 analysis of the biographies of culture
heroes published in popular magazines. Lazarsfeld's
own research (1940) on the comparative effects of radio listening
and reading was the first serious examination of this
important question. His influence on the field outlived him:
In 1983 the directors of social research of the nation's three
largest networks—CBS, ABC, and NBC—were all former
students of Lazarsfeld.The Bureau of Applied Social Research. In 1939 the Rockefeller
Foundation radio research grant was renewed but
transferred from Princeton to Columbia University, where
Lazarsfeld was first appointed a lecturer and in 1940 an associate
professor of sociology. In 1944 the Office of Radio
Research was renamed the Bureau of Applied Social Research.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Bureau expanded
its program and grew steadily in terms of both revenue and
staff. By the mid-1970s, its annual budget was more than a
million dollars, and it employed at any one time more than
100 people, half of them full time. In 1977, however, a year
after Lazarsfeld's death, the university withdrew its support,
the Bureau closed its doors, and its legacy and library were
transferred to a new Center for the Social Sciences, located
on the Columbia campus.
The Bureau's offices were temporary and makeshift
throughout its life span; it never quite became the established,
university-based social research institute that Lazarsfeld
had first dreamed of in Vienna. But it survived for forty
years, generally amidst administrative chaos, and with conspicuously
little financial support from the university. The
research ideas it fostered, the leading social scientists who
were trained there, the innovative research it sheltered, and
its distinctive organizational structure have greatly influenced
the institutionalization of the social sciences throughout
the world.7
Lazarsfeld remained at Columbia from 1940 until his retirement
in 1969; in 1962, he was appointed Quetelet Professor
of Social Sciences, a chair that had been created forhim. Unwilling to give up teaching altogether after his retirement,
he traveled almost weekly to the University of Pittsburgh,
where he served as Distinguished Professor of Social
Sciences from 1969 until his death.
THE INTERACTION OF THEORY AND METHOD
During his fifty-two years of active professional life, Lazarsfeld
made important contributions to four substantive
areas in the social sciences: the social effects of unemployment,
mass communications, voting behavior, and higher
education. These contributions did not spring from a grand
design, but were largely the results of historical accidents and
opportunities seized. By his own accounts, Lazarsfeld studied
the effects of unemployment in an Austrian village in the
early 1930s because the Social Democratic leader Otto Bauer
had ridiculed his plan to study leisure during a severe economic
depression. He studied the impact of radio in the late
1930s because he was a poor immigrant in need of a job—
and Robert Lynd found this one for him. His study of the
1940 U.S. presidential election grew out of a planned evaluation
of U.S. Department of Agriculture radio programs directed
at farmers: Lazarsfeld simply wanted to do a panel
study. All his life he was interested in university organization,
but his major study of higher education came about because
in the early 1950s Robert M. Hutchins, the president of the
Fund for the Republic, asked him to do a study of how college
and university teachers reacted to McCarthyism. Throughout
his life, he insisted that serendipity was at the core of the
process of scientific discovery.
Methods of Analyzing Survey Research. When Lazarsfeld
studied the effects of radio in 1937, he realized that because
radio listening created no public records, such as circulation
data, it needed new methods of accounting and study. He
took the opinion poll—at that time used mainly for descriptive purposes, to measure such features as the popularity or
audience size of radio programs—and by the multivariate
analysis of responses developed ways to measure the impact
of radio on attitudes. This transformation of the opinion poll
into multifaceted survey research constitutes one of Lazarsfeld's
major accomplishments.
Several important procedures to follow in the analysis of
survey data are described in "Problems of Survey Analysis"
(Kendall and Lazarsfeld 1950), a pioneering codification of
techniques for avoiding spurious causal relationships in the
analysis of survey data and establishing the time sequence of
variables.
The Panel Method for the Study of Change. A major finding
of Lazarsfeld's research on radio listening is the tendency of
audiences to be self-selected; that is, to tune in to programs
that are compatible with their own tastes and attitudes. Accordingly,
in order to sort out the causal sequences of such
problems as the effect of listening upon attitudes versus the
effect of attitudes upon patterns of listening, a method of
determining the time order of variables was required. Drawing
on his research in Vienna with the Biihlers, in which
repeated observations were made of the same children over
time, as well as on the earlier research of Stuart A. Rice
among Dartmouth College students and Theodore M. Newcomb
among Bennington College students, Lazarsfeld developed
what he called the panel method, in which a sample
of respondents is reinterviewed at periodic intervals.
The panel method is a form of longitudinal research; it
is essentially a field experiment in which a "natural" rather
than an experimental population is studied. Although Lazarsfeld
cannot be said to have invented the panel method, it
was his imaginative use of it, and particularly his innovative
ways of introducing control groups into the analysis of panel
data, that made him its earliest and most effective exponent.
The Study of Interpersonal Influence. Lazarsfeld used the opportunity provided by his pioneering study of the 1940 U.S.
presidential election to test and extend the panel method as
a field technique. The study was published as The People's
Choice (1944), a spare and elegant book that has become a
true classic. The substantive findings of the study are as important
as the methodology. First, a great deal was learned
about the psychological and social processes that delay, inhibit,
reinforce, activate, and change voting decisions. People
subject to cross pressures, for example, delay making a decision
longer than do others. Second, the study uncovered
an influence process that Lazarsfeld called "opinion leadership."
It was found that there is a flow of information from
the mass media, initially to persons who serve as opinion leaders,
and then to the public. This process was termed the "twostep
flow of communication" (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955).
Techniques developed by Lazarsfeld for measuring interpersonal
influence, opinion leadership, and networks of
influence stimulated a wide variety of studies. His students
and, in turn, their students, developed variants of the
method and new fields of substantive application.8
The Analysis of Action. Throughout his long professional
life, Lazarsfeld was intrigued by the problem of how to study
"action" from the point of view of the actor. Much of his
research, as well as the work of his students, concerned the
codification of motives and conditions underlying people's
behavior—a research procedure that came to be known as
"reason analysis." At the heart of the procedure is the development
of what is called an "accounting scheme"—a model
of the action being studied that incorporates the dimensions
of the act that guide the collection of empirical data. Many
of the data in an accounting scheme are obtained by personal
interviews, and in a crucial part of the interview the interviewer
asks the questions necessary for the analyst to do whatLazarsfeld called "discerning": that is, determining not only
that a person was exposed to a given influence, but that he or
she acted in a certain way because of that exposure.
Lazarsfeld's initial article on reason analysis, "The Art of
Asking Why" (1935), was published shortly after he arrived
in the United States, and is based largely on consumer studies
that he had carried out at the Forschungsstelle in Vienna.
The article identifies three types of data that need to be obtained
by asking "why" questions in studying consumer purchases:
(1) influences that lead toward action, (2) relevant
attributes of the product, and (3) motives of the purchaser.
This formulation has a generality that goes far beyond consumer
research, and has been widely used—with adaptations
and extensions—by Lazarsfeld, his students, and others.9
The intensity of Lazarsfeld's interest in the study of action
is indicated by an important 1958 historical essay and by the
attention given to it in his two methods readers (1955, 1972),
in his autobiographical memoir (1968), and in his essay
"Working With Merton" (1975). He viewed the analysis of
action as a way of merging the study of individuals with the
study of the aggregate effects of individual actions, and thus
as a way of merging psychology and sociology.
The Relationship between Individual and Collective Properties.
Techniques for relating the characteristics of individuals to
those of collectivities were termed by Lazarsfeld "contextual
analysis." They involve characterizing individuals by some
characteristic of the group to which they belong (the context).

It is then noted how individuals who are similar in other ways
differ in their opinions or behavior in accordance with their
group. The characteristic of the group may be an aggregate
of individual characteristics (as in "climate of opinion" studies)
or it may be a so-called "global" characteristic that describes
the collectivity as a whole. Lazarsfeld first made systematic
use of the procedure in a 1955 study of social science
faculty members in American colleges and universities (Lazarsfeld
and Thielens 1958).
Mathematics in the Social Sciences. Lazarsfeld never abandoned
his early interest and training in mathematics. He
sought for many years to introduce improved mathematical
methods into the social sciences with efforts such as his work
in latent structure analysis and in dichotomous algebra. His
own work was primarily in mathematical psychology, because
he sought to model processes within the individual. His impact
on mathematical sociology was of a different kind: he
posed problems, he raised questions, and he organized the
efforts of others. James S. Coleman dedicated his Introduction
to Mathematical Sociology to him, and eight colleagues and former
students contributed mathematically based articles to the
1979 Festschrift.