About Paul Lazarsfeld
Paul Felix Lazarsfeld was an Austrian-American sociologist and mathematician. The founder of Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research, he exerted influence over the techniques and the organization of social research. "It is not so much that he was an American sociologist," one colleague said of him after his death, "as it was that he determined what American sociology would be." Lazarsfeld said that his goal was "to produce Paul Lazarsfelds". He was a founding figure in 20th-century empirical sociology. Lazarsfeld invented the latent class model for clustering multivariate discrete data. 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. With Marie Jahoda, he had a daughter, Lotte Franziska Lazarsfeld (born 1930), later Lotte Bailyn, who became a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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