During the 1940s and 1950s, the Department of Sociology at Columbia University was dominant such department in the United States. It owed this distinction mainly to Paul F. Lazarsfeld, an investigator of mass communication effects and a research methodologist, who collaborated with his colleague Robert K. Merton, a sociological theorist. Lazarsfeld pioneered the university-based research institute, first in Europe at the University of Vienna and later in the United States at the University of Newark, Princeton University, and Columbia University. His Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia was famous in the 1940s and 1950s for conducting the most important investigations of mass communication effects.

Lazarsfeld was born in Vienna and grew up there, highly involved in socialist politics. He organized and led the Red Falcon youth organization of the Socialist party. He earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics at the...