First published in 1955, "Personal Influence" reports the results of a pioneering study conducted in Decatur, Illinois, validating Paul Lazarsfeld's serendipitous discovery that messages from the media may be further mediated by informal "opinion leaders" who intercept, interpret, and diffuse what they see and hear to the personal networks in which they are embedded. This classic volume set the stage for all subsequent studies of the interaction of mass media and interpersonal influence in the making of everyday decisions in public affairs, fashion, movie-going, and consumer behavior. The contextualizing essay in Part One dwells on the surprising relevance of primary groups to the flow of mass communication. Peter Simonson of the University of Pittsburgh has written that "Personal Influence was perhaps the most influential book in mass communication research of the postwar era, and it remains a signal text with historic significance and ongoing reverberations...more than any other single work, it solidified what came to be known as the dominant paradigm in the field, which later researchers were compelled either to cast off or build upon." In his introduction to this fiftieth-anniversary edition, Elihu Katz discusses the theory and methodology that underlie the Decatur study and evaluates the legacy of his coauthor and mentor, Paul F. Lazarsfeld.

"One of the main theses of the Marienthal study was that prolonged unemployment leads to a state of apathy in which the victims do not utilize any longer even the few opportunities left to them. The vicious cycle between reduced opportunities and reduced level of aspiration has remained the focus of all subsequent discussions." So begin the opening remarks to the English-language edition of what has become a major classic in the literature of social stratification.

The People’s Choice is a landmark psychological and statistical study of American voters during the 1940 and 1944 presidential elections, originally published in 1948. Amid a burgeoning interest in statistics and population sampling, it constituted the first systematic effort to trace voters’ behavior across the duration of a presidential campaign and to follow up on this data years later. During the 1940 campaign, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet tracked a sample population of six hundred people from Erie County, Ohio, interviewing them monthly in the seven months leading up to Election Day. Their subsequent study in 1944 expanded the sample to include a nationwide cross-section of two thousand voters. Contrary to the fears of the time, Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet found that media such as newspapers, radio, and campaign advertising did not have a profound influence on individual voting habits. Instead, interpersonal interactions and word of mouth were more significant for most voters. They argued that mass media reached a small but crucial subset of people, who then passed information on to less avid media consumers. The study paired the same interviewers and interviewees over time, leading to remarkable extended conversations that feature more casual and exploratory discussions than were typical of social-scientific research. Quoted verbatim, they offer additional insight into the American electorate. A groundbreaking work of empirical political science, The People’s Choice remains of great importance in an era of anxiety about the influence of media on voting behavior.

First published in 1955, "Personal Influence" reports the results of a pioneering study conducted in Decatur, Illinois, validating Paul Lazarsfeld's serendipitous discovery that messages from the media may be further mediated by informal "opinion leaders" who intercept, interpret, and diffuse what they see and hear to the personal networks in which they are embedded. This classic volume set the stage for all subsequent studies of the interaction of mass media and interpersonal influence in the making of everyday decisions in public affairs, fashion, movie-going, and consumer behavior. The contextualizing essay in Part One dwells on the surprising relevance of primary groups to the flow of mass communication. Peter Simonson of the University of Pittsburgh has written that ""Personal Influence" was perhaps the most influential book in mass communication research of the postwar era, and it remains a signal text with historic significance and ongoing reverberationsamore than any other single work, it solidified what came to be known as the dominant paradigm in the field, which later researchers were compelled either to cast off or build upon." In his introduction to this fiftieth-anniversary edition, Elihu Katz discusses the theory and methodology that underlie the Decatur study and evaluates the legacy of his coauthor and mentor, Paul F. Lazarsfeld. "Elihu Katz" teaches at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the coauthor or coeditor of more than 20 books including "Medical Innovation: A Diffusion Study. Paul F. Lazarsfeld" (1901-1976), one of the major figures in twentieth-century sociology, was the founder of Columbia University's Bureau for Applied Social Research. He is the coauthor of "Marienthal," available from Transaction. "Elmo Roper" (died 1971) founded the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, located at the University of Connecticut, just after World War II.

"One of the main theses of the Marienthal study was that prolonged unemployment leads to a state of apathy in which the victims do not utilize any longer even the few opportunities left to them. The vicious cycle between reduced opportunities and reduced level of aspiration has remained the focus of all subsequent discussions." So begin the opening remarks to the English-language edition of what has become a major class in the literature of social stratification.

The study on which "Marienthal" is based was conducted in 1930 in Austria, at the time of a depression that was worse than anything experienced in the United States. But the substantive problem is still very much with us, although our focus is now poverty rather than unemployment. In Austria, the institutional response to mass unemployment was the dole. Unlike the work relief programs of the New Deal, the dole system left workers destitute and idle. The essential finding of this research is that when people are deprived of work, there is a breakdown in the personality structure of a group.

"Marienthal" represents a colossal breakthrough in social research. It provides a combination of quantification and interpretive analysis of qualitative material-an approach that remains in the forefront of present-day research design. The work combines statistical data at hand, case studies, information on historical background of those being studied, and questionnaires combined with solicited reports that enhances a sense of daily life without intrusion by investigators. The work provides a unique insight into how creative innovations can assist in overcoming collective deprivations.

The work of Marie Jahoda, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and Hans Zeisel was sponsored by the then newly created Psychological Institute at the University of Vienna. Each of the authors went on to extraordinary professional careers. Jahoda held positions at New York University, Brunel University, and the University of Sussex. Lazarsfeld spent the better part of his career from 1933 to his death at Columbia University in New York City. Zeisel came to the University of Chicago after the rise of Nazism.

Without Paul F. Lazarsfeld the social sciences would not be what they are today. In his ground-breaking work on unemployment, voting, consumer behavior, and social influence, among other subjects, his methodological emphasis on vigorously controlled scientific language and structures transformed social research worldwide.
Lazarsfeld's systematic criticism of observational, conceptual, and inferential procedures in sociology led to the the formation of universally applied observational and analytical techniques, such as the panel design of observation and contextual and multivariate analysis. His methodology for empirical social research had a profound effect on all the social sciences.
The eighteen essays in "On Social Research and Its Language" illustrate the diversity of Lazarsfeld's substantive, methodological, and organizational interests. Spanning the years 1933 to 1972, they encompass his own works of social research, as well as writings on methodology and the history and sociology of social research. Articles on methodology--observing, classifying and building typologies, analyzing the relations between variables, qualitative analysis, and macrosociology--form the bulk of the book. In addition, Raymond Boudon provides a revealing biography of Lazarsfeld and his influence on sociology.
These classic writings by a formative figure of modern social science will be an indispensable reference for scholars across the historical and social science disciplines.

Voting is an examination of the factors that make people vote the way they do. Based on the famous Elmira Study, carried out by a team of skilled social scientists during the 1948 presidential campaign, it shows how voting is affected by social class, religious background, family loyalties, on-the-job relationships, local pressure groups, mass communication media, and other factors. Still highly relevant, Voting is one of the most frequently cited books in the field of voting behavior.

A lucid, stimulating introduction to a wide range of mathematical techniques, their usefulness in thinking, and their application to concrete data and specific cases. This important book offers a selection of papers cutting across the several disciplines in the social sciences in which mathematical techniques, especially model building, are increasingly becoming tools for research and conceptualization. Most of the papers are either early, seminal contributions to this type of research to psychology, sociology, political science, economics, anthropology, and linguistics or definitive statements synthesizing investigations by separate persons or groups. Each of the 18 papers is placed in its disciplinary and historical context by the editors, who also interpolate frequent commentary within papers and provide thoroughly annotated reading lists for further exploration into each subject area and a chronological bibliography covering the rapid growth of mathematical social science during the past decade.