Criticism
A major portion of Lazarsfeld's research concerned the individual decision-making process and how it was influenced by the mass media. The Marienthal study was an exception, being biased toward the community, but in all the studies carried out in localities after Marienthal (Sandusky, Elmira, and Decatur, for example), the individual was much more clearly the unit of analysis. While Lazarsfeld clearly did not see his own research agenda as the only approach to communication research, others criticized his "administrative research"—paid for by commercial and military funding—as an overwhelming move toward empirical, short-term, effects-based research.
The ascendency of administrative research provided an effective foil for critics. Theodor W. Adorno, who had worked under Lazarsfeld at the Radio Project, came to represent an intellectual tradition that contrasted with Lazarsfeld's own dedication to empiricism and willingness to collaborate with industry. Likewise, Lazarsfeld's focus on empirical discovery rather than grand theory ("abstract empiricism" in the words of C. Wright Mills) was one of the spurs that led Robert K. Merton to develop what he called "theories of the middle range."
In the end, he thought that his ideas of empirical research had not been as widely received as he might have hoped. In one of his last published papers, "Communication Research and Its Applications: A Postscript" (1976), Lazarsfeld lamented that the tide had turned against empirical research and that "while an increasing number of writers expressed the need, it certainly was not the subject of popular demand among sociologists."
Read more about this topic: Paul Lazarsfeld
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)