ABSTRACT
In the fall of 1936, just as Paul Lazarsfeld was settling into his role as director of the Research Center at the University of Newark, John Marshall of the Humanities division at the Rockefeller Foundation approached Hadley Cantril, a professor in the social sciences at Princeton, about setting up a radio research project under the auspices of the university. Cantril was then in the process of founding the journal Public Opinion Quarterly, and with co-author Gordon All-port he had produced one of the first important studies on how radio was creating a “new mental world” in The Psychology of Radio, published in 1935. Marshall was an amateur radio enthusiast and an early supporter of research into the social effects of mass communications, and, on this basis, the Trustees of the Foundation had called on him to see what kind of study could be done about radio. They wanted to know who was listening and why, and what they liked and disliked. Ultimately, they wanted to find a way to demonstrate that there was an audience for programs of a “higher educational value,” so that broadcasters might develop such more culturally “valuable” kinds of programs.
