Columbia
After a falling out with Cantril, which may have been financial in nature, the Radio Project moved to Columbia University, where it grew into the acclaimed Bureau for Social Research. At Columbia, the direction of research leaned toward voting, and a study of the November 1940 vote was published as The People's Choice, a book that had a substantial effect on the nature of political research.
During the 1940s, mass communication entrenched itself as a field in its own right. Lazarsfeld's interest in the persuasive elements of mass media became a topic of great importance during the Second World War and this resulted in increased attention, and funding, for communication research. By the 1950s, there were increased concerns about the power of the mass media, and with Elihu Katz, Lazarsfeld published Personal Influence, which propounded the theory of a two-step flow of communication, opinion leadership, and of community as filters for the mass media. Along with Robert K. Merton, he popularized the idea of a narcotizing dysfunction of media, along with its functional roles in society.
Lazarsfeld died in 1976. He had a son, Robert Lazarsfeld, now a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan, who published Positivity in Algebraic Geometry (Springer) in 2004.
Read more about this topic: Paul Lazarsfeld
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