ABSTRACT
PAUL FELIX LAZARSFELD’S enormous contribution to the field of mass communications research has been widely recognized, thanks especially to his many former students and colleagues who have written in honor and praise of him.2 Such evaluations by former students and colleagues are rarely critical, and they are often conducted with an eye toward aggrandizing one’s own position by demonstrating one’s own association with the “great” individual being so honored. Yet, these motivations notwithstanding, Lazarsfeld’s former students and colleagues were correct to acknowledge his wide impact on the development of the field. One of these former students, James S.Coleman, credited Lazarsfeld with nine significant contributions to the field of sociology generally, including such contributions to mass communication research as initiating the use of survey panel methods in public opinion polling; creating the prototype for conducting large-scale, university-based social research; and becoming the chief proponent of the “two-step flow of mass communications,” which was to become the dominant paradigm in mass communication research.3 Coleman could have gone further still by noting that Lazarsfeld’s Office of Radio Research at Princeton University was the very first academic unit in the United States to be devoted solely to the study of mass communications research; Lazarsfeld’s published work dominated the mass communications research field during its early years so much that he had to often use the pseudonym, Elias Smith, in order to avoid the embarrassment of having his own name appear on published communication research too frequently; and Lazarsfeld greatly influenced the thinking of many graduate students who assisted him and took their degrees under him.
