ABSTRACT
Paul Felix Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton – and it was probably primarily Lazarsfeld's viewpoint and an expression of his deep convictions – formulated several principles of wider validity that were applied during the last ten, fifteen or twenty years of Lazarsfeld's work in communication research and in the work of his research school and many of his investigative teams. The combination of multiple research methods, the development of new methods, the accumulation of research findings, the expansion of the scope of research, and the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods – these were the driving convictions behind Lazarsfeld's communication research. Allen Barton, Paul Neurath and David Sills, three of Lazarsfeld's most prominent biographers, share the view that one of Lazarsfeld's most important achievements was the creation of the institutional foundations of empirical social research. Lazarsfeld achieved the organisational and institutional changes chiefly in the 1930s and 1940s, which were the two decades that he devoted to mass communication research.
