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Week 8: Paul Lazarsfeld and Mass Communication Effects, Department of…

- - - - shaped Lazarsfeld social research experience
        
        Lazarsfeld taught statistical method courses in social psychology and applied psychology
        
        conducted studies of contemporary social problems on workers and unemployed men.
        
        Psychoanalysis was frowned upon in Buhler's department.
        
        highlights conflict between qualitative and quantitative methdologies
        
        Lazarsfeld molded Qualitative and quantitative together.
        
        Empirical work: qualitative analysis is guided by conceptual schemes and each empirical procedure is scrutinised in a quantitative manner
        
        enlisted as Chairman at Lazarsfeld's institute
        
        put Lazarsfeld forward to the Rockefeller official :silhouette: Tracy B. Kitteridge and helped him obtain a travel fellowship to U.S.
  - - - Divide between Empirical and Theoretical School at Columbia University
        
        Lynd was an empirical sociology scholar in Columbia university but the chair of the sociology department was theoretical and felt that sociology should be the study of social organization.
        
        :silhouette: Robert MacIver made the offer in 1931 to hire Lynd for a full-professorship but immediately regretted this decision as Lynd brought the empirical-theoretical division into Columbia's Sociology department until 1941 when Lazarsfeld and Merton collaborated
        
        1933: Lazarsfeld visited Lynd at Columbia
        
        helped Lynd with data analysis problems on Lynd's survey studies of effects of depression on middle-class families
        
        attended and made speeches at Lynd's doctoral seminars.
        
        1935: Lynd helped Lazarsfeld and landed Lazarsfeld his first job at Newark New Jersey
        
        Migrated to U.S. from Vienna
        
        became director of a National Youth Administration research project on unemployment.
        
        1936: Lazarsfeld created the Research Center at the University of Newark
        
        consisted of himself and his small cadre of student relief workers and a nonexistent colleague Elias Smith
        
        1937: Lynd Recommended Lazarsfeld to Hadley Cantril for the Radio Research Project Director position
- - - - helped him obtain his fellowship as he was blocked from university advancement due to his being jewish. As consolation, Buhler put Lazarsfeld forward for the Rockefeller fellowship to the U.S.
        
        Rockefeller Foundation was alerted to Lazarsfeld's academic abilities and also his Marienthal study
- - - - :silhouette: Lotte Danziger began market research in the Research center
        
        Lazarsfeld market research could fund scholarly research on human behaviour (purchase preferences) and able to sponsor the research center's activities.
        
        audience studies and consumer market studies of products (beer, butter, milk, etc)
        
        made a modest salary from market research contracts, but mostly remained a penniless institute
        
        trained young socialist intellectuals from the Rote Falken to become social researchers at his institute like :silhouette: Hans Zeisel, :silhouette: Gertrud Wagner
        
        had clients from the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research directed by Max Horkheimer
        
        Lazarsfeld Research Institute gathered data from Austria on Authoritarian figures in Horkheimer's study with Erich Fromm.
    - - Previously studied Viennese beggars: begging was a form of job, powerful organization, regulated hours and places of work, fees for the hiring of chlidren of various ages
        
        :red_flag: Marienthal study focused on the effects of unemployment: a serious and important social problem in the worldwide Great Economic Depression of the 1930s.
        
        one of the best-known study by Lazarsfeld's institute
        
        Marienthal town was chosen because it exemplified an acute social problem, not because it represented an average town in Vienna
        
        funded by Rockefeller Foundation with some small grant money
        
        methodology: personal observations, in-depth case studies, historical materials, field data gathering
        
        Findings: under great duress, the majority were losing a sense of invovlement, perspective and time. The state of mind is broken down and apathetic
        
        foreshadowed the lack of resistance to Hitler's takeover and if promised food, shelter and work by an extreme radical party, they would follow him no metter how extreme. –– learned helplessness "breaking point"
        
        :!!: presented the findings of Marienthal Study of Unemployment at the International Congress of Pyschology in 1932
        
        accorded Lazarsfeld his academic reputation and helped him obtain a travel fellowship to the U.S from Rockefeller
    - - Question-and-Interviewing design was created
        
        Cross-tabulation by using different methods and integrating these methods to get a holistic view of the problem statement.
        
        advanced methodological techniques for social research
  - - - :!!: Many university research institutes were patterned after Lazarsfeld Model
        
        :silhouette: Wilbur Schramm's Institute of Communications Research at Illinois in 1947 and Stanford in 1955
      - 1937: directed the Radio Research Project called :newspaper: The Essential Value of Radio to All Types of Listeners associate-directed by Cantril and Stanton
        
        :red_flag: Societal Trends that intersected with Lazarsfeld's career and led him to Mass communication research
        
        radio had been around for 15 years since the 1930s, started in 1920 and was being rapidly adopted by the 1940s.
        
        AT&T launched the first radio station to sell advertising and had strong commercial values.
        
        KDKA in Pittsburgh was the first commercial radio station in 1920 for masses
        
        :!!: in the 1930s, Hitler's fascist Germany led to interest in part of the government to research Propaganda Effects and Public Opinion formation.
        
        :silhouette: Josef Goebbels focused interest on electronic means of communication in disseminating propaganda messages
        
        :silhouette: Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal Program: threatened freedom of radio braodcasting
        
        Radio station officials utilised market research to obtain empirical data about radio's effects on audiences
        
        needed to persuade advertisers to buy radio advertising (market research became important)
        
        advertising agencies needed market research as a means of designing and marketing products to match consumer's needs
        
        eg. newspaper used circulation figures to measure
        effects but radio had an invisible size hence, used audience ratings data and demographic characteristics.
        
        :red_flag: Lazarsfeld's Radio Research Project had three annual reviews of radio research, coedited by :silhouette: Frank Stanton of CBS
        
        gave radio research a coherence and visibility that it had not previously possessed.
        
        Lazarsfeld was recommended by Lynd to work on the radio project at Newark Research Center
        
        Rockefeller Foundation wanted to improve the quality of radio programs and :silhouette: John Marshall had a strong interest to demonstrate to radio networks that an audience existed for higher cultural content in 1936 and funded radio research projects sa well as films nad boks through the Rockefeller Foundation from 1937 to 1941.
        
        pushed for cultural improvements and educational value of better radio programs
        
        radio networks did not fund these research for the fear of harming advertising and ratings, continued to program for mass audiences.
        
        Marshall coined the term Mass Communications
        
        :silhouette: Hadley Cantril and :silhouette: Gordon Allport
        :book: The psychology of Radio
        
        :red_flag: Lazarsfeld had free reign to develop research methodologies in radio research due to the absence of previous research and the newness of the medium.
        
        main priorities were methodological not mass communicational