P a u l F . L a z a r s f e l d 1901—1976 A Biographical 4

RECOGNITION
Lazarsfeld received many acknowledgments of his accomplishments during his lifetime. He was president of both the American Association for Public Opinion Research (1949-50) and the American Sociological Association (1961—62), and he was an elected member of the National Academy of Education as well as the National Academy of Sciences. He received honorary degrees from Chicago and Yeshiva universities
in 1966, from Columbia in 1970, from Vienna in 1971, and from the Sorbonne in 1972, the first American
sociologist ever so honored. In 1955 he was the first recipient of the Julian L. Woodward Memorial Award of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, and in 1969 the Austrian Republic awarded him its Great Golden Cross, largely for his help in establishing the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna in 1963. He was a much sought-after consultant, speaker, and teacher. Shortly after his death, a Paul
F. Lazarsfeld Memorial Fund was established in order to sponsor a series of lectures in his honor. In 1983 a large collection of his books and papers was dedicated as the Lazarsfeld Archives at the University of Vienna.

LEGACY

Lazarsfeld's innovations in consumer research and his effect on the business and advertising communities were substantial. He was a major trainer and model for the generation of advertising and market researchers that matured in New York City in the decades following World War II. His work in communications research helped create it as a field of scholarship, and through his analyses of propaganda during
World Wrar II and his influence upon the research activities of the Voice of America, he helped create the field of inter national communications research. His model for the institutionalization
of training and research in the social sciences is embodied in dozens of thriving research organizations
around the world. He was one of the founders of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. His use of the sample survey as a tool for causal analysis helped transform opinion polling into a scientific method, and his development and use of the panel method
has enormously influenced a wide range of evaluations of the effect of educational or social reform programs.
Marginality. In spite of these achievements, Lazarsfeld felt that he was somehow an outsider in America, a marginal person, never at the center of things. Why did he feel this way? He thought that it was the result of his Jewishness, his foreignness, his heavy accent, and his interest in such a lowstatus activity as market research—but these reasons are not fully convincing. He lived his life, as he once put it, like a  bicycle rider, always compensating so as not to fall off. He left his marginal position at the University of Vienna for
equally marginal positions at Newark, Princeton, and (at least initially) Columbia. He left mathematics because he knew that he would never be in the first rank, but he never quite believed that events had transformed him into a sociologist. He approached every new research topic from a startlingly
new direction, and he took pride in the originality of studies carried out at the Columbia Bureau, in contrast to the more traditional research carried out at other university centers such as those at Chicago and Michigan. Like an expert skier, who knows that the best snow is generally at the edge of the
trail, his genius kept him carefully away from the accepted center of most problem areas. "But look," he would say with his hand raised, and then proceed to outline a highly original plan of action.

Lazarsfeld's self-perception of marginality was allied to his conception of his role in the social sciences: to be on the margin is also to be on the frontier. It can also be argued that his marginality contributed to the intellectual traffic between ideas and methods that made him a singularly influential figure in the history of social research. In a memorial article published in Le Monde shortly after Lazarsfeld's death, Raymond
Boudon noted that "his work has attained the most noble form of marginality: many of the ideas which he introduced have become so familiar that hardly anyone bothers to
attribute their paternity to him." The Search for Convergences. One consequence of Lazarsfeld's
sense of marginality for his intellectual activity was his never-ending search for convergences between different intellectual traditions—convergences that could serve to enrich both traditions. His search for convergences undoubtedly was a result of being Viennese: bold syntheses are characteristic intellectual products of Vienna. His collaboration with the theorist Merton is the most obvious of these convergences.
Other convergences that he encouraged were between disciplines: psychology and sociology; mathematics
and sociology; anthropology and media research; and sociometry and survey research. He sought both a convergence and a mutual understanding between the critical sociology of the Frankfort school (see especially the writings of T. W. Adorno) and the dominant positivistic trend in American sociology, as well as between Marxist sociology and mainline European—American sociology.
Other convergences he sought were between the social sciences and the humanities. He used his early studies of radio to build bridges between the social sciences and such fields as literary analysis and music. He sought to relate the philosophy of science and empirical social research, historical analysis and opinion research, and logic and concept forPAUL F. LAZARSFELD 275 mation. While some of his critics were accusing him of mindless quantification, he was spending time reading and talking with some of the nation's leading humanists, historians, and philosophers.
Finally, he sought convergences between different research traditions and methods. He made connections between small-group research and the use of sample surveys to study interpersonal influence (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955) and between the use of fixed-choice questions in surveys and so-called open-ended interviewing. His work on concept formation (1966) and index construction (see Lazarsfeld, Pasanella,
and Rosenberg 1972) is a monument to interdisciplinary borrowing and to making connections. With Allen
Barton, he took a polemic of C. Wright Mills against the decline of "craftsmanship" and developed it into a scheme for studying the man-job relationship (Barton and Lazarsfeld 1955). And he encouraged the foremost qualitative researcher of the 1950s—David Riesman—to reinterview asample of the respondents during his study of American social scientists (Lazarsfeld and Thielens 1958). A volume of interdisciplinary essays edited by Mirra Komarovsky, Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences (1957), was inspired by him
and prepared under his general direction. A modern-day Leonardo da Vinci, he largely ignored the traditional specialization of knowledge and sought to find new truths by bringing people and ideas together.
The convergence in the social sciences that Lazarsfeld tried hardest to effect is that between quantitative and qualitative research. In almost every field in which he worked, he tried to fuse these two productive modes of inquiry: it was the theme with which he ended his presidential address to the American Sociological Association; the journal Quality and Quantity was founded in 1967 under his direct influence;
and for all these reasons the Festschrift in his memory is titled Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research.13 In the words of James S. Coleman, he was "one of those rare sociologists who shaped the direction of the discipline for the succeeding generation."14 THE AUTHOR is PARTICULARLY GRATEFUL for the assistance and suggestions of the following friends and associates of Paul F. Lazarsfeld: Albert E. Gollin, Patricia L. Kendall, Robert K. Merton, Paul M. Neurath, and Hans Zeisel.