ABSTRACT
As a pollster and professor of communication at the University of Mainz, Elis-abeth Noelle-Neumann was not only a public opinion and communication scholar; she was also a methodologist at heart. She provided the field with a specified research methodology to test the spiral of silence, was known for her intuition and hardheadedness when constructing items and designing questionnaires, and was never reluctant to criticize other spiral of silence studies she perceived as inappropriate in methodological terms. Needless to say, Elisabeth Noel le-Neumann engendered a rich legacy of ideas that sparked many interesting debates and infused the fields of public opinion and political communication with theoretical and methodological vitality.
