Paul F. Lazarsfeld
February 13, 1901 – August 30, 1976
Paul F. Lazarsfeld was born in Vienna, Austria on February 13, 1901, the son of Robert Lazarsfeld, a lawyer, and Sofie Munk, a psychotherapist. He earned a doctoral degree in mathematics from the University of Vienna in 1925. In his dissertation he applied Albert Einstein’s theory of gravitation to the movement of the planet Mercury.
But mathematics was not to hold his attention for long. Lazarsfeld’s true interests soon became the development of social research methodology and the establishment of institutes for training and research in the social sciences.
In 1933, Lazarsfeld moved to the United States for a Rockefeller Fellowship. At the University of Newark he established a small social research center. When his project was moved to Columbia University in 1940, Lazarsfeld went with it, remaining at Columbia until his retirement in 1969.
Lazarsfeld was elected to serve as the 52nd President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential Address, entitled “The Sociology of Empirical Social Research,” was delivered on September 1, 1962 at the Association’s Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. His address was later published in December 1962 issue of American Sociological Review (ASR Vol. 27 No. 6 pp 757-767).
Obituary
Paul Felix Lazarsfeld was born on February 13, 1901 in Vienna, Austria. He died at age 75 on August 30, 1976, in New York City. From 1940 until his retirement in 1969, he was at Columbia University, where in 1962 he became the first Quetelet Professor of Social Sciences. At the time of his death he was Distinguished Professor of Social Science at the University of Pittsburgh. During his career he received honorary degrees at five universities: Columbia, Chicago, Sorbonne, Vienna, Yeshiva. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the National Academy of Education. He was the president of the American Sociological Association.
The influence of Paul Lazarsfeld on sociology was both broad and deep. His work touched a remarkable variety of fields: mass communication research, political sociology, market research, qualitative and quantitative methods, mathematical sociology, survey research techniques. What 1s equally remarkable is that his work not only touched these fields, but in many of them either transformed the field or indeed began it.
His academic activity began in Vienna. In 1925, he received his PhD in mathematics. Almost immediately after that he was attracted to social psychology by Charlotte and Karl Buhler, and he taught as an assistant at their Institute at the University of Vienna. While he was there, he carried out, with Marie Jahoda and Hans Zeisel, research leading to Dr. Arbeifslosen von Marientlial, a study of massive unemployment in an Austrian town. Already this research showed the inventiveness in use of qualitative and quantitative data that was one mark of Lazarsfeld’s work (for example, the comparison of diaries of unemployed men and their busy wives, or the measurement of the pace of walking, or changes in the circulation of the political newspaper and sports-oriented newspaper after unemployment began).
Lazarsfeld left Austria, and after a short period as an interpreter in France (a country to which he always felt strong emotional ties and to which he frequently returned), he arrived in the United States as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in 1933. With the rise of the Nazis, he remained in the United States, and took a job at the University of Newark. It was here that he began an activity that had in two ways a lasting impact on American social science. He began an applied social research center, which was the prototype for his later Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia, and subsequently for applied social research institutes in universities throughout the country. And in this new center he began radio audience research, which became the prototype and forerunner of the field of mass communications research. In 1937 he moved to Princeton University, and then to Columbia in 1940, where he joined the sociology department and established (if the word “establish” can be used for this organizational innovation in the University) the Bureau of Social Research.
The dominant contents of Lazarsfeld’s work in this country can be roughly described as consisting of four overlapping phases. First, from 1935 to about 1950, he did extensive work in mass communications, reflected in Radio Research in 1941, 1942, 1943, Personal Influence (1955) and other volumes, and accompanied by innovations in the budding methodology of survey research. In this work he stimulated (and staffed with his students) the growing fields of commercial audience and market research. If research in mass communications had a single father, it was Paul Lazarsfeld. And along with this, he, perhaps more than anyone else, transformed “polls and surveys” into tools designed to answer analytical modeling and path fields, it is difficult to realize that only a short while ago, sample surveys were designed merely to estimate population characteristics, as election polls are now used. Lazarsfeld, perhaps more than anyone else, initiated their use for causal inferences both in the influential Lazarsfeld-Kendall paper, “Problems in Survey Analysis” and in his analyses of survey data. From 1940 to about 1954, he initiated work in political sociology, marked by two important election studies, The People’s Choice (144) and Voting (1954), accompanied by the methodological innovation of panel analysis. Again, the importance of these studies was not merely what they told us about voting behavior, but their initiation of a whole research direction. Third, there is his work in mathematical sociology, beginning with work in latent structure analysis in the late 1940s, including the influential Mathematical Thinking in the Social Sciences (1954) and Latent Structure Analysis (1967), and continuing until his death. Both in his own work, and in the stimulation he provided to the field, he probably had as much to do with the development of modern mathematical sociology as anyone. Fourth is his work on the training, organization, and utilization of social research, which was marked by his creation of Columbia’s Bureau, his role in the founding of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (in 1954) and the Institute for Hohere Studien in Vienna (in 1963), and his recent work at Pittsburgh in the utilization of research, resulting in An Introduction to Applied Sociology (1975).
This rough grouping leaves out other directions of work, such as The Academic Mind (1958), which would be landmarks in a lesser career. But more important, it omits a central element of Lazarsfeld’s importance. His publications and their impact constitute only a fraction of his influence on social research. He could not and would not keep his intellectual concerns to himself. It was difficult to be in or near sociology at Columbia and not be drawn into Lazarsfeld’s activities. He pulled into his orbit at one time or another colleagues and students of all stripes, ranging from C. Wright Mills to Duncan Luce. In teaching as well as research, he was interested in the interaction of his ideas with those of others. For some years, he taught an influential seminar in mathematical sociology with Ernest Nagel. His seminars at the Bureau brought excitement to the whole place.
This pattern of intellectual interaction characteristic of Lazarsfeld had its strongest and longest manifestation in his relation with Robert Merton. Over a period of more than twenty years, Lazarsfeld and Merton, in research, writing, and teaching, both together and separately, constituted “Columbia sociology. More than that, this combination constituted for a period of years the dominate force in American sociology. For Europeans, it was American sociology; paradoxically, the “American sociology” which has had such a strong influence in Europe since World War II is a sociology shaped in considerable part by a man born and educated in central Europe.
Paul Lazarsfeld’s legacy for social science lies partly in his written works. But more than that it lies in the very character and shape of sociology today.
