Background

Paul Felix Lazarsfeld was born in Vienna, Austria to middle-class Jewish family. He was the son of Robert Lazarsfeld and Sofie Munk. His father was a lawyer with a penchant for defending impecunious political activists; as a result, the family's circumstances were modest.

Education

Lazarsfeld enrolled at the University of Vienna. His doctorate, awarded in 1925, was in applied mathematics.

Career

He first planned on a career in law, but his interest changed to mathematics. No sooner had Lazarsfeld begun teaching mathematics and physics in a Gymnasium in Vienna than his attention was diverted to social and psychological issues. Alfred Adler had trained Lazarsfeld's mother as a psychologist, and the young mathematician developed an intellectual attraction to Adler, whose opposition to Freud had a strong sociological tinge. Adler had been instrumental in educational reform in Vienna, and Lazarsfeld became, in his words, an "amateur 'educator, '" working as a counselor in socialist children's camps and as a tutor in high schools for working-class youths. That involvement reinforced his interest both in Marxism--he had earlier been active in the Socialist Student Movement--and in social science.

As a graduate student, Lazarsfeld had been exposed to writers prominent in science and the philosophy of science, particularly Ernst Mach, Henri Poincaré, and Albert Einstein. In his doctoral dissertation he had applied Einstein's theory of gravitation to the movement of the planet Mercury. If he had studied social science instead of mathematics, it is unlikely that he would have been exposed to these intellectual influences, for the social sciences were then dominated by philosophical and speculative approaches. Instead, he came to realize that in the social sciences, as in all science, the research procedures by which truths are uncovered are central to the successful development of a field. That focus on methodology became the hallmark of Lazarsfeld's work and, through him, helped to shape American sociology.

A turning point in Lazarsfeld's thinking came with the arrival at the University of Vienna, in 1923, of two distinguished German psychologists, Charlotte and Karl Bühler. Lazarsfeld attended their seminars and was asked by them to teach statistics. He established and directed an independent research center, the Division of Applied Psychology. He conducted consumer research for European and American firms as well as research in basic social psychology--which he was teaching at the university--and he encouraged graduate students to do their dissertations on data collected by the center. His own study of youth and occupational choice (published in Jugend und Beruf, 1931) demonstrated the limited opportunities for advancement available to working-class youngsters. The criticism of a draft of that study by Charlotte Bühler and Lazarsfeld's response to it had a permanent effect on his later work. Lazarsfeld later wrote that she had "objected strenuously" to the compassionate tone of the section on proletarian youth, in which he had disparaged the bourgeoisie because of its exploitative practices. He rewrote the section, and the discussion became descriptive and detached. This episode contributed to the later controversy over the value-free stance of American sociology that was led by C. Wright Mills. In his voluminous subsequent publications, there is no hint that Lazarsfeld had ever been a Marxist. Noteworthy in Jugend und Beruf was the demonstration of the importance of social-class position in determining life chances. Although class position was a central focus among both Marxist and non-Marxist sociologists, little empirical work had been done in Europe or in America using it as an explanatory variable. Lazarsfeld was one of the first to use that pivotal concept in an empirical study.

In 1933, Lazarsfeld won a Rockefeller Foundation traveling fellowship that brought him to the United States. Political unrest in Austria led to his request for an extension of the award, and by the fall of 1935, he decided to remain. Capitalizing on a position he had secured with the New Jersey Relief Administration, Lazarsfeld established a research center at the University of Newark in 1936, with himself as the director. The following year, he was appointed the director of the Office of Radio Research (ORR) at Princeton University, which had been established to study the effect of radio on American society. Lazarsfeld's being in so prestigious a position was partly a result of his reputation as an innovator among a group of young "empiricists" to whom he had demonstrated the spurious effect certain variables such as age could have on correlations in statistical studies. He also had impressed Robert Lynd, the Columbia University sociologist whose study Middletown had, in some respects, paralleled that of Marienthal, a village that Lazarsfeld had investigated in Austria. Lynd set out to find Lazarsfeld a job in an academic world that was inhospitable to both foreigners and Jews. Lynd wrote one prospective employer that the Austrian did not look very Jewish, only to receive the reply that "Lazarsfeld shows clearly the marks of his race. " Lynd finally convinced Hadley Cantril, a Princeton psychologist, that Lazarsfeld was the person for ORR. Not until much later was Lazarsfeld able to overcome his feelings of marginality that resulted from his foreignness, his Jewishness, and his marked accent.

At ORR, Lazarsfeld worked with Frank Stanton, the director of research of the Columbia Broadcasting System (later the president of that network), who was an associate director of ORR; together they became pioneers in the new field of mass communications. In 1939, ORR was transferred to Columbia University, where Lazarsfeld soon joined the department of sociology. ORR became the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR) and in 1945 was incorporated into the Columbia University structure. Lazarsfeld molded the bureau along the lines that he had developed in Vienna, and graduate training in sociology at Columbia came almost to require an apprenticeship in the research center. The graduate students who passed through it included some of the most distinguished sociologists in the United States and abroad. Lazarsfeld credited Charlotte Bühler with giving him an example of how a research institute should be organized. Yet he was aware that some members of the Vienna center had felt exploited by her, a charge later made against him as director of BASR.

In its early stages, ORR and then BASR were given only token financial support by their universities. Lazarsfeld conceived of a funding system whereby the research would be backed by grants from foundations, businesses, and government bureaus so that he would be free of the fiscal constraints imposed by inadequate university support. Doing research on contract for outside interests was a major innovation that spread throughout the academic world and represented a turning point in the history of American universities. Lazarsfeld's aim was to use BASR and the classroom to develop methods for the study of individual and mass behavior using the rigor of mathematics. His own specialty was mathematical sociology. As might be expected, given the diverse sources of BASR's funding, the studies produced varied from simple market research surveys--such as--"Should Bloomingdale's Maintain Its Restaurant?" --to more basic inquiries, such as studies of voter preferences in the presidential elections of 1940 and 1948. The latter research made voting behavior an essential part of a new specialty, political sociology, another of Lazarsfeld's substantive interests.

BASR became a dominant influence in sociology at Columbia and, through its graduate students, in American sociology and beyond. Although Lazarsfeld gave up the directorship to become the chairman of the sociology department in 1951, his influence at BASR never waned. Columbia displaced the University of Chicago as the preeminent sociology department in the country. In retrospect, Lazarsfeld used BASR to institutionalize empirical research in the social sciences. That is, research was organized within the bureau, it was funded from outside the university, and it became collaborative--the single scholar doing an empirical study became outmoded; Lazarsfeld almost always had collaborators. His major methodological approach was the social survey. That method, which exemplified Lazarsfeld's mission to "quantify complex experiences, " involved a number of components, including a sample of the population to be studied, an interview or a questionnaire whose questions or "items" reflected the objective of the research, and a statistical analysis of the responses that related them to the age, race, ethnicity, gender, social class, education, occupation, and religion of the respondents.

Survey research dominated not only American sociology but also public opinion and mass communications, fields in which Lazarsfeld also achieved prominence. Many distinguished Columbia faculty members--including C. Wright Mills--did survey research under the auspices of BASR. What could be called the "Columbia school of sociology" shaped the field in postwar America. Lazarsfeld had his detractors. Some argued that the most important aspects of human experiences were so elusive that they were not subject to quantification or that sociology was a humanity as well as a social science, thereby requiring something analogous to artistic insight. Mills argued that Columbia's sociology was dehumanizing in its insistence on value detachment, and he refused to teach graduate students. Others charged that too often BASR's products were "little studies" of obscure fragments of social life. Some objected to the idea of the sociologist-for-hire enabling capitalists to manipulate consumers. Interestingly, sometimes the captains of industry suffered from the far-from-perfect state of market research. BASR's study of the social psychology of automobile buying produced several reports for the Ford Motor Company that it used to plan what became the Edsel. Much of the criticism was unwarranted. Lazarsfeld had always believed that good sociology required a combination of insight, quantification, and a variety of methods.

His study of Marienthal had used not only quantitative methods, including interviews and what came to be known as "unobtrusive measures" (such as the circulation of books from workers' libraries), but also qualitative methods, such as participant observation and life-history analysis. Lazarsfeld's name was equated with quantitative methods, but he always gave qualitative approaches their full measure. Lazarsfeld had two collaborators in the Marienthal study, Hans Zeisel and Marie Jahoda.

Lazarsfeld conducted many market research studies of limited sociological interest and importance--he used the alias Elias Smith to hide their authorship--but his substantive work was marked by a search for explanation and for theory. He worked closely with Robert K. Merton, the equally brilliant Columbia theoretician, and together they demonstrated the interdependence of theory and empirical research. When critics argued that survey research, by focusing on live respondents, neglected historical influences, Lazarsfeld added a historian to the sociology faculty, an unprecedented appointment.

During the convulsions in the American university attendant on the war in Vietnam, the sociology department at Columbia came under attack. Ironically, the Marxist approach, which Lazarsfeld had left behind him in Austria, was one of the intellectual spearheads in this. To some extent, quantification, attention to methodological detail, and value neutrality were sacrificed to new approaches, which frequently were ideologically motivated. BASR lost its predominant position in 1977 and was merged with other research centers at Columbia and became the Center for Social Science. Lazarsfeld died in New York City.

During his lifetime, Lazarsfeld received many honors. He was appointed Quetelet professor of social sciences at Columbia in 1962, the title reflecting both his perduring interest in mathematics and his ambivalence about calling himself a sociologist. After retiring from Columbia he became distinguished professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh (1969 - 1976).

Lazarsfeld's many publications include Six Papers on Statistical and Educational Psychology (1930); Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal (1933), with Marie Jahoda and Hans Zeisel; The People's Choice (1944), with Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet; Voting (1954), with Bernard Berelson and William N. McPhee; The Language of Social Research (1955), with Morris Rosenberg; Personal Influence (1955), with Elihu Katz; and The Academic Mind (1958), with Wagner Thielens, Jr.

Achievements

• Lazarsfeld was the founder of Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research. His legacy includes a focus in social science on empirical studies, a self-consciousness with the procedures used to conduct survey research, sophisticated statistical analysis, and the creation of institutional conditions that promoted research and the training of graduate students. He was also considered a co-founder of mathematical sociology and noted for developing the two-step flow of communication model.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Academic Mind: Social Scientists in a Time of Crisis

    (The authors based this study on interviews with various a...)

  • Radio And The Printed Page

    (Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)

  • Qualitative analysis; historical and critical essays

    (Classic essays on conducting qualitative (rather than qua...)

  • Les Chômeurs de Marienthal

    (Les chomeurs de Marienthal)

  • Continuities in the language of social research.
  • Organizing educational research,: An exploration
  • Readings in mathematical social science
  • The people's choice;: How the voter makes up his mind in a presidential campaign,
  • Personal Influence; the Part Played By People in the Flow of Mass Communications
  • The uses of sociology;

Membership

Fellow of the American Statistical Association

Connections

Lazarsfeld married Marie Jahoda, who had been his student. They had one child and were divorced by 1933. He married twice more, each time to a former student and collaborator: Herta Herzog and Patricia Kendall, who at the time of his death was distinguished professor of sociology at Queens College of the City University of New York. He and his third wife had one child.

Father:

Robert Lazarsfeld

lawyer

Mother:

Sofie Munk

Spouse:

Marie Jahoda

Spouse:

Herta Herzog

Spouse:

Patricia Kendall

References

• The mind traveller: A guide to Paul F. Lazarsfeld's communication research papers (Special report)
• Paul Lazarsfeld (1901-1976): La sociologie de Vienne à New York (Collection Logiques sociales) (French Edition)
• Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research: Papers in Honor of Paul F. Lazarsfeld
• Paul Felix Lazarsfeld - Leben und Werk. Anstatt einer Biografie (Edition Sozialwissenschaften, 1)
• Paul Felix Lazarsfeld - Zu seinen frühen Studien (German Edition)