ABSTRACT
This is a photo of Professor Michael Pfau, a former Department Chair at the University of Oklahoma. He passed away in 2009, but not before he taught or inspired generations of scholars, including Stephen. While he respected all paradigms of thought, he was at his heart a social scientist. On Stephen’s first day of Introduction to Graduate Studies at the University of Oklahoma, Michael said, “You should be any kind of researcher you want, as long as you are good at it.” When he said he was a social scientist, a student asked what that was. He said something to the effect of how his approach to research closely resembles the natural sciences, and that he looks for causal laws, to develop testable theories, gathers empirical data, and is value-free in his testing of theory. These four issues came up a lot in his discussions of social scientific theory and method. Michael made a prolific career out of being a social scientist; his work on inoculation has spawned countless studies (for reviews see Pfau & Burgoon, 1988; Pfau, Kenski, Nitz, & Sorenson, 1990; Szabo & Pfau, 2002). Stephen became a social scientist under Michael’s mentorship.
