ABSTRACT
Paul Lazarsfeld’s approach to market research, which he shared with many of his students and colleagues at Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR or “the Bureau”)—the organization that grew out of the Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored Office of Radio Research—merged the quantitative methods of empirical social research with the psychological approach of motivation research. Yet among survey researchers and opinion pollsters in the 1930s and 1940s, Lazarsfeld came to be associated with psychological methods and the concept of the “depth interview,” which created serious interest but also skepticism and confusion among many market researchers. Some of those in the field, such as Henry C. Link, flatly dismissed the research value of the depth interview as he understood it. Link, whom Lazarsfeld had dismissed as a “radical” behaviorist, was the director of the Psychological Corporation, where Lazarsfeld had found an environment inhospitable to his ideas as a Rockefeller fellow in the early 1930s. There was no proof, Link maintained, that the depth interview could actually do what its name implied: to “dig deeper” into the respondent’s mind than an ordinary interview could. Link argued that the claims of the method’s proponents—that it could reveal unconscious motivations through a probing interview—was incorrect, because probing only produced more rationalizations on the part of the respondent. The more immediate response, which the subject gave without thinking, was actually closer to the truth and further from rationalization, Link believed. Link would only credit the depth interview method with producing a greater quantity and variety of information—but not a greater quality of information, relative to the standard survey questions he used. The main problem was the interviewer himself, who could not be trusted not to taint the responses of the subject through suggestion. In Link’s view, this was an entirely unscientific method, and the rigorous market researcher would be better off designing a questionnaire which could produce “depth” results through its specific wording and sequencing, which the interviewer would then be obligated to follow precisely. For this reason Link preferred the term informal (not “depth”) interview to refer to the unstructured format, which was useful only as a preliminary step; this was in contrast to the formal interview, which, he believed, could arrive at the same results that the proponents of the “depth” approach proclaimed. Moreover, Link argued, the formal interview was much more amenable to tabulation and quantification, and was therefore more useful as a tool of market research. 1
