Paul Lazarsfeld Research Articles

Entre intelectuales y expertos: una aproximación a los debates norteamericanos sobre los medios de comunicación (1940-1950)

This article considers the discussions that part of the United States intelligentsia, in the late 1940s and early 50s, had about the relationship between communications media and society. Specifically, it delves into the theoretical reflections of authors such as Paul Lazarsfeld, Harold Lasswell, Robert Merton, and Gladys and Kurt Lang. Our analysis stems from our exploration of the academic itineraries of the aforementioned authors and their place among American intellectuals. With this as our starting point, we reconstruct three lines of inquiry that, with varying degrees of intensity, preoccupied this group of investigators: processes of cultural democratization, the reach and limits of mass media’s social function, and media’s political influence. By thinking about how the outputs of these authors relate to each other, we can visualize the divergences and nuances within the American communications tradition known as Mass Communication Research.

ОНТОЛОГІЯ КОМУНІКАТИВНОЇ РЕАЛЬНОСТІ

The authors consider the problem of communication as social reality in the context of conceptual representations of non-classical ontology. These views are based on the idea of variability in the interpretation of basic philosophical category of reality. Works of Chris Berry, Jean Baudrillard, Robin Dunbar, Paul Lazarsfeld, Harold Laswell, Andrew Zverintsev, Charles Cooley, Merab Mamardashvili, Alina Panfilova, Alan Pulford, Paul Smith, Arkady Ursuland and others are devoted to this problem.The article aims to clarify the ontological meaning of the concept «communicative reality». It can resolve conceptual representations of non-classical ontology that is based on the idea of variability of interpretation basic to the concept of space is a philosophical category of reality.Non-classical ontology interprets the concept of «reality» as a collection of objects and phenomena that have approximately the same being or exist in the same way. If being is the property of objects, and existence is their procedural characteristics, then reality is the very objects that possess this property and realize this action. Thus, the objects and phenomena of the material world exist in one way and form an objective reality. There is another way and form of artistic reality. Plans, projects, fantasies have a way of existence and form of mental reality. Therefore, there is an idea of coexistence of different realities. Thus, it is possible to consider not only one reality («actually existed»), but also different realities that constitute the «sector of existence». In this case, it is necessary to speak not about reality, but about reality in a particular sector of life (objective, subjective and virtual reality). That is, the communicative reality can be defined as the particular sector being associated with a subjective interpretation of the real world. Is it possible to define a specific combination of objects, existing solely in the communication processes according to the laws that differ from laws of objective and virtual reality?Therefore, social communication is the result of the interaction of objectively existing segments of the social structure, with defined interests and requests. Social communication is based on existing channels of social ties and actually existing social interests and preferences. It is established that the person prefers to obtain information from a limited number of sources, which he/ she considers asthe closest social environment. Information is perceived positively if it meets social needs of individuals. Information influence that does not consider requests and exceeds the threshold of perception is filtered out as information noise. The patterns of perception of information determine certain forms of informational influence.Thus, the communicative reality even when generating a virtual picture of the world relies on objectively existing social relations, patterns of perception of information and the channels of mass communication. To sum up, the authorsgive an ontological definition of communication space– a set of conditions of interaction of social facilities, with a focus on specific layers of links between the communication objects.

El éxito de los Youtubers: cuando la influencia digital y el branding personal convergen

With web 2.0 brands have penetrated the network through influential spokespeople (youtubers, for example) that expose the benefits of their products. To date, digital efforts have in many cases been effective. Nevertheless; A different phenomenon is increasing its value around these characters: the launch of own products. This event has opened eyes on the level of influence that youtubers have on their audience, in scenarios such as May 25, 2016, Filbo Bogota collapsed due to a Youtuber that brought together more than 15,000 people to buy his book. A fact that emphasizes the investigative interest since it provides a panorama on the new consumption behaviors in young audiences and still more, the levels of influence of these personages. With this, it‟s proposed as a main objective to determine the factors of success that a digital influencer has when launching a product of it‟s own. It‟s a case study of Sebastian Villalobos, the Colombian influencer with the largest number of followers on Youtube, with 4,543,854 subscribers in his main channel, who just a year ago launched YouTube School, (his first own product, a book) to his audience, being a resounding success. This paper is developed through the theory of persuasion Maximum Influence and postulates of influence by Paul Lazarsfeld, in addition to the theory of personal branding by Dan Schawbel. The methodological design becomes the qualitative paradigm, with a descriptive - exploratory scope. Supported in in-depth interviews with: Lina Caceres; Manager, Sofia Castro; Youtuber Colombian with a close relationship with other Colombian youtubers including Sebastian Villalobos, and some people from his audience. In addition, Was used the technique of speech analysis and content in the product released. Netnographic observation with the help of social Listening tools like SYSOMOS of the behavior of the influencer with his audience in social networks. Finally, the application of 350 fan‟s surveys of the influencer.

Preface and Introduction to the Second Edition of “The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes up his Mind in a Presidential Election Campaign”

This translation contains an introduction to the second edition of a book written by Paul Lazarsfeld and his co-authors (Lazarsfeld P.F., Berelson B., Gaudet H. The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948.), which became an important benchmark for the development of the methodology of sociological sample surveys, and which marked the emergence of a new method – “panel surveys”. This new method opened up unprecedented opportunities for transitioning from simply registering the public opinion at any given moment, utilizing a series of surveys each time with the participation of new respondents, towards tracking the emergence, shifts and dissociation of certain opinions, ideas and behavior patterns on an individual level. Thereby in contrast to static evaluation a new model had been proposed, “a disciplined and limited kind of dynamic research”, which its authors associated with the long-term development of all social sciences.

From the Ringstraße to Madison Avenue: Commercial Market Research and the Viennese Origins of the Mass-Culture Debate, 1941–61

Paul Lazarsfeld's social research organizations, as centres for cosmopolitan refugees who pioneered communications studies, were instrumental in producing some of the most prominent mass-culture critics in the post-war US—both native and émigré—including C. Wright Mills, Leo Lowenthal, Theodor Adorno, and David Riesman. But among Lazarsfeld's fellow Viennese colleagues, perhaps the most prominent in the contemporary popular mind was Ernest Dichter, a psychological consultant to marketers who probed the unconscious of consumer subjects in an effort to reveal their hidden motivations. Dichter was not a critic of mass culture but rather a celebrant who was embraced by the American business class. He entered into the public sphere, however, as the subject of criticism in journalist Vance Packard's exposé The Hidden Persuaders. Lazarsfeld saw no essential contradiction between the critics of mass culture and its industrial purveyors; instead, he saw these forces existing in a dialectical relationship with one another. In this sense, it was no accident that his research institutes nurtured both cultural critics and the agents of industrial mass society.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Critical versus Administrative Policy Studies—Celebrating 75 Years since Paul Lazarsfeld's “Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communication Research”

Introduction to the Special Issue: Critical versus Administrative Policy Studies—Celebrating 75 Years since Paul Lazarsfeld's “Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communication Research”

Revisiting the Origin of the Administrative versus Critical Research Debate

Abstract This scholarly essay by Elihu and Ruth Katz recounts the story of the “high moment” of the original debate between administrative and critical theory. The tensions between the Frankfurt and Vienna schools of immigrant scholars of the 1930s are captured in the conflict between Paul Lazarsfeld, who engaged with the then-new commercial model of media research, and Theodor Adorno, a critical scholar, who disdained it, over the Princeton Radio Research Project (1937–1944). In the end, they conclude that something of the other's model rubbed off on each of them.

Revisiting the Origin of the Administrative versus Critical Research Debate

Abstract This scholarly essay by Elihu and Ruth Katz recounts the story of the “high moment” of the original debate between administrative and critical theory. The tensions between the Frankfurt and Vienna schools of immigrant scholars of the 1930s are captured in the conflict between Paul Lazarsfeld, who engaged with the then-new commercial model of media research, and Theodor Adorno, a critical scholar, who disdained it, over the Princeton Radio Research Project (1937–1944). In the end, they conclude that something of the other's model rubbed off on each of them.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Critical versus Administrative Policy Studies—Celebrating 75 Years since Paul Lazarsfeld's “Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communication Research”

Introduction to the Special Issue: Critical versus Administrative Policy Studies—Celebrating 75 Years since Paul Lazarsfeld's “Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communication Research”

Conflicting Administrative and Critical Paradigms in Data Tracking Policy: A Lazarsfeldian Analysis

In 1941, Paul Lazarsfeld wrote that administrative research in communications (of which he was a founding figure) is often criticized for addressing only “little problems, generally, of a business character…” while critical research can be criticized for focusing on dramatic high-level ideals and “showing up” those in power, but with a lack of “fact-finding or constructive suggestions.” This article considers Lazarsfeld’s conceptions to be a functional dichotomy, and then compares that dichotomy to a modern policy debate in telecommunications: personal data tracking by Internet firms and proposals in the American government for regulating it. This article will argue that the administrative/critical dichotomy can be observed in the contentions of industry leaders, consumer advocates, media commentators, and politicians who have contributed to this policy debate.

Paul Felix Lazarsfeld’s Impact on Sociological Methodology

Paul Felix Lazarsfeld was a major figure in the development of modern empirical methods in sociology and the social sciences. He laid many of the foundations for social survey techniques and other empirical methods for understanding key aspects of contemporary society, such as voting studies, opinion polling, panel studies, and mass media research. The American Sociological Association Methodology Section honors each year a distinguished sociologist with the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for a career of distinguished contributions to the field of sociological methodology. Paul Lazarsfeld’s methodological work that he was most proud of was his introduction of the concept of latent classes, latent class analysis, and latent structure analysis. We consider in this paper Lazarsfeld’s institutional impact through this ASA award though we focus our discussion on his work and his impact on the development of latent class/structure analysis.

From Interiority to Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Radio in Twentieth-Century France

From Interiority to Intimacy:Psychoanalysis and Radio in Twentieth-Century France Judith G. Coffin (bio) In 1967, Radio Luxembourg recruited Menie Grégoire, well known for her journalism, her expertise on “women’s” issues, and her keen interest in psychoanalysis, to host an audience write- and call-in program on the airwaves. Her radio-therapeutic conversations quickly displaced the advice-from-experts programs and family radio dramas that had been staples of Radio Luxembourg since the end of World War II. Radio Luxembourg was a privately owned “radio périphérique”; its shows were produced in Paris, cabled to Luxembourg, and broadcast out. The program reached deep back into France. By 1970, nearly 2.5 million listeners were tuning in to Grégoire, and thousands of them were writing and calling her program. With the systematizing ambition of a social scientist, Grégoire saved and classified the letters she received (nearly one hundred thousand over fifteen years) and took notes on the telephone calls (around sixteen thousand), aiming to create in the process something like a chart of her interlocutors—what one sociologist calls a “geography of the interior” (Ecrits et Cris de la vie, 6, 35; Maréchal, 218).1 Historians can mine Grégoire’s archive for testimony on countless subjects, from provincial culture to the reverberations of 1968 and the changing politics of sexuality. Her notorious 1971 confrontation with gay activists during a live broadcast from the Salle Pleyel in Paris became a French Stonewall, a flashpoint for gay liberation and the whole anti-psychiatric movement.2 But the program was above all a phenomenon of radio and radio’s history. Virtually all the aspects of Grégoire’s enter-prise—her psychoanalytic self-presentation, the audience-participation format, the letters from listeners, and the careful archiving of those letters in the name of sociology and audience research—represent a bundle of ambitions and projects that were central to radio for most of the [End Page 114] twentieth century. Examining even one part of it, as I do here, namely her conception of radio as a psychoanalytic “adventure into the interior,” reveals remarkably enduring conceptions of radio’s power and purpose and throws into relief the historical moments that reshaped those conceptions. It has been more than a decade since Vanessa Schwartz’s influential and compelling “Walter Benjamin for Historians” underscored the centrality of the image to Benjamin’s conception of modernity and summoned historians to turn toward the visual. As Schwartz herself points out, the transformations of culture, human perception, and experience that Benjamin pegged to modern times in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”—a felt collapsing of distance sensory vulnerability, new and more distracted forms of reception, the reconstitution of art as an “object for simultaneous collective experience” and a “change in the mode of participation” in culture—were attributed by many, including Benjamin, to audio as well as to visual media and technologies (1723; Benjamin, 222–23, 228–29).3 Moreover, the qualities that Benjamin’s contemporaries (for reasons we will discuss later) attributed to the auditory in particular—suggestiveness, vulnerability, and interiority—were no less central to the modern self or constitutive of modernity (Connor). Radio proved a powerful magnet to twentieth-century modernists. Radio studios drew in artists and writers from the French surrealists to Benjamin, Carpentier, and Beckett. The “new mental world created by radio” seized the imaginations of modernists in the social sciences, whether psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, or critical theory. The Princeton Radio Research Project, founded by Paul Lazarsfeld in 1937, attracted an eye-popping array of thinkers, including Hadley Cantril, Gordon Allport, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Rudolf Arnheim; the Radio Research Project is but one example of the multidisciplinary fascination with radio and the psychological, political, and commercial possibilities it presented. Not surprisingly, interpreting twentieth-century modernism’s interests in radio as well as, more broadly, communication, sound, hearing, and listening has proved an enormous project, and studying radio’s significance has helped to fuel what deserves to be called a “sonic boom” across the humanities and social sciences. I am interested here in Grégoire’s conception of radio as a distinctively...

Changing Minds or Changing Channels?: Partisan News in an Age of ChoiceKevinArceneaux and MartinJohnson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Changing Minds or Changing Channels?: Partisan News in Age of Choice Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013.In era of partisan television news networks and ideologically-driven hosts, commentators, and analysts, it comes as no surprise that many blame the highly polarized nature of American politics on mainstream media. Yet, in Changing Minds or Changing Channels?: Partisan News in Age of Choice, Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson challenge this widely held perception. With so many viewing options today, Arceneaux and Johnson suggest that partisan news media actually have a very small effect on the general public because most people simply avoid the news and only a small self-selected group of individuals gravitates towards partisan news programs.This trend, which is described by Arceneaux and Johnson, is a relatively new phenomenon caused by the changing media landscape. In the years before widespread cable and Internet access, television news programs attracted large audiences simply because there were so few options. Today, however, ninety percent of American homes are connected to cable or satellite television, and the average person now has access to more than 130 channels. With so many non-news programs available, the audience for highly partisan news networks is relatively small, even among politically involved individuals. As Arceneaux and Johnson point out, while about 130 million Americans voted in both the 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections, the four top-rated cable news shows draw just 7.5 million viewers on average day.To advance this premise, Arceneaux and Johnson present a new active audience theory. Based on the uses and gratifications approach of Elihu Katz, Jay G. Blunder, and Michael Gurevitch and the minimal media effects perspective of scholars including Bernard Berelson, Paul Lazarsfeld, William McPhee, and Joseph Klapper, active audience theory suggests that the viewing public is not an inert mass, passively and unquestioningly soaking in the content to which they are exposed (3). Instead, Arceneaux and Johnson suggest that the viewing public is comprised of active participants, whose decisions, regarding what they view and how they interpret it, mitigate the potential effect of media content.To test their theory, the authors conducted a series of eleven experiments, which they present and explain throughout this book. After a general overview of the topic in the first chapter, a history of media effects research and the rise of partisan cable news in the second chapter, and a discussion about how television viewers actively engage with the programs they choose to watch in the third chapter, the authors dive into their findings. …

How to make opinion leaders and influence people.

At face value, a key opinion leader (or more commonly “KOL”) in medicine is an influential physician or researcher who is held in high esteem by their colleagues. The term originates from studies of influence in the 1940s by communications theorist Paul Lazarsfeld, who was skeptical about how

Reassessing the People's Choice: Revisiting a Classic and Excavating Lessons for Research About Media and Voting

This article reassesses The People's Choice by Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, one of the foundations of communication and voting behavior research. As with most classics, which are often cited but seldom read, we believe this book has much to teach contemporary social scientists. We return to the original context of the research and use voting data from the period with three broad goals: (a) to find ideas and lessons from this work that generally have been overlooked, (b) to suggest new ways of applying these ideas, and (c) to encourage scholars to engage more with this seminal work to understand ideas that are often overlooked when a complex piece of research is reduced to a brief discussion or passing citation.

Empirical and Theoretical Knowledge in Adorno's "Experimentation in Music Psychology"

The standard empiricist criticism of Theodor W. Adorno is that he privileges theory over practice.1 No episode in his life better encapsulates this problematic than his famously unsuccessful collaboration with the positivistic social scientist Paul Lazarsfeld on the Princeton Radio Research Project (1938–41). Prior to the publication of Current of Music, the collection of Adorno's writings and lectures from this period, it was possible to read this episode in terms of a caricatured dichotomy between Lazarsfeld's scientific empiricism and Adorno's empty speculation (and difficult personality). But now we no longer have to rely solely on the later recollections of Adorno,…

Adorno’s radio phenomenology

Adorno’s phenomenological study of radio offers a sociology of music in a political and cultural context. Situating that phenomenology in the context of Adorno’s philosophical background and the world political circumstances of Adorno’s collaboration with Paul Lazarsfeld on the Princeton Radio Project, illuminates both Adorno’s Current of Music and the Dialectic of Enlightenment with Max Horkheimer and the ‘Culture Industry’. Together with an analysis of popular music in social practice/culture, this article also explores Adorno’s spatial reflections on Paul Bekker’s notion of the community-building power of the symphony, including his reflection on the radio face which he elaborated in terms of both time and the physiognomics of the time-space of sound, private and communal, and adds connections with today’s Internet and related media.

Radio Studies and 20th-Century Literature: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Remediation

This article provides an overview of the history of radio studies as it intersects with 20th-century literary studies, and outlines recent research trends in the field. Beginning with the earliest theorists and practitioners of radio (including Hilda Matheson, Rudolf Arnheim, and Lance Sieveking), the article considers how mid-20th-century attitudes to radio as a medium of cultural expression varied among Marxist thinkers (Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht), sociologists (Paul Lazarsfeld and Hadley Cantril), and media theorists (Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong). The article then examines how two recent scholarly developments – the expanded conception of modernist culture under the name of the “new modernist studies” and the growth of sound studies as an interdisciplinary field with both aesthetic and historical implications – have, since the mid-1990s, inaugurated a new wave of literary radio scholarship. These distinct but related developments have fostered newly integrated approaches to the study of radio as a medium that intersects not only with literature but with other media; the article therefore provides a summary of recent works that approach radio through a lens of remediation (the mutual influence and interpenetration of various media), as well as works that consider the aesthetic and ethical potential of the medium. The article closes by noting important avenues still to be explored, including questions of cultural hierarchy and “the middlebrow,” transnational broadcasting, and the cultural life of radio in the age of television and beyond.

Problems and prospects of measurement in the study of culture

What is the role of measurement in the sociology of culture and how can we sort out the complexities that distinguish qualitative from quantitative approaches to this domain? In this article, we compare the issues and concerns of contemporary scholars who work on matters of culture with the writings of a group of scholars who had prepared papers for a special symposium on scientific measurement held at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) back in 1956. We focus on three issues—the recurring need to reinvent measurement (as illustrated by the career of the psychologist S.S. Stevens), the linkage between qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis (as articulated in the writings of the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld), and the assertion (by philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Peter Caws) that theorizing necessarily precedes measuring. We review a number of important advances in the way that measurement is theorized and implemented in the sociology of culture and we also point to a number of enduring dilemmas and conundrums that continue to occupy researchers in the field today.

Adorno on the Airwaves: Feeling Reason, Educating Emotions

In 1949, Jewish-German critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno, a member of the group of intellectuals now known as the Frankfurt School, returned to West Germany from exile in the USA. This article examines a lesser-known aspect of Adorno's participation in the West German public sphere: namely, his radio broadcasts around the topos of “eine Erziehung zur Mündigkeit” (a pedagogy fostering political maturity/autonomy). Adorno's critique of the medium of radio as an arm of the reified “culture industry” is well documented. What, then, are we to make of his sociopolitical contribution to the German public sphere in the form of over one hundred radio broadcasts in the late 1950s and 1960s? This article broaches the question by analyzing his now-canonical 1960 broadcast on Hessischen Rundfunk titled “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?” (“What does Coming-to-Terms-with-the-Past Mean?”). Arguing for the centrality of affect for Adorno's postwar work, I demonstrate how he stages a pedagogy emphasizing the necessary relationship between reason and affect (Kant avec Freud) in achieving self-reflective thought and political autonomy. Finally, Adorno's earlier attack on music educational shows as “pseudo-democratic” (1938-1941 in Paul Lazarsfeld's Princeton Radio Research Project), complicates any straightforward elaboration of a postwar public pedagogy.