Introduction

This chapter discusses Paul Lazarsfeld's first work in radio research, his research on Vienna Radio audiences in 1932 and his first American media investigation. The whole pattern of communications research, which was established in the thirties and forties in the course of academic and commercial research, is the final product of the coordinated process of qualitative and quantitative investigations. At the start of communications studies Lazarsfeld did not have a single perfect "strategy of radio and communication research process". This was developed step by step in the course of inquiry. But the general idea of using different methods, of accumulating findings and verifying and retesting them, all of this was present in Lazarsfeld's work before he started the examination of this field of study. Lazarsfeld has contributed to sociology by starting the systematic process of institutionalisation of empirical social research as a part of the academic field.