Influence
Lazarsfeld's many contributions to sociological method have earned him the title of the "founder of modern empirical sociology". Lazarsfeld made great strides in statistical survey analysis, panel methods, latent structure analysis, and contextual analysis. He is also considered a co-founder of mathematical sociology. Many of his ideas have been so influential as to now be considered self-evident. He is also noted for developing the two-step flow of communication model.
Lazarsfeld also made significant contributions by training many younger sociologists. One of Lazarsfeld's biographers, Paul Nerauth, writes that there are "dozens of books and hundreds of articles by his students and the students of his students, all of which still breathe the spirtit of this man's work". One of Lazarsfeld's successful students was Barney Glaser - propounder of grounded theory (GT) - the world's most quoted method for analyzing qualitative data. Index formations and qualitative mathematics were subjects taught by Lazarsfeld and are important components of the GT method according to Glaser. James Samuel Coleman, an important contributor to social theories of education and a future president of the American Sociological Association, was also a student of Lazarsfeld's at Columbia.
Lazarsfeld's other significant contributions consisted of constructing the institutions for academic sociology in the United States, including the "shop model" of collaborative research.
Paul Lazarsfeld has been the President of the American Sociological Association(ASA) and the American Association for Public Opinion Research. He has received honorary degrees from many universities, including University of Chicago, Columbia University, University of Vienna and Sorbonne University. Columbia University's social research center has been renamed after him. The career achievement award of the ASA Methodology section is also named in his honor.
Read more about this topic: Paul Lazarsfeld
Famous quotes containing the word influence:
“Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children. Consider the silent influence which flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower. When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me; my most delicate experience is typified there.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Cultural expectations shade and color the images that parents- to-be form. The baby product ads, showing a woman serenely holding her child, looking blissfully and mysteriously contented, or the television parents, wisely and humorously solving problems, influence parents-to-be.”
—Ellen Galinsky (20th century)
“Constitutional statutes ... which embody the settled public opinion of the people who enacted them and whom they are to govern—can always be enforced. But if they embody only the sentiments of a bare majority, pronounced under the influence of a temporary excitement, they will, if strenuously opposed, always fail of their object; nay, they are likely to injure the cause they are framed to advance.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)