Paul Lazarsfeld's Contributions to the History of Empirical Social Research

During the 1960s Paul F. Lazarsfeld, co-founder of the renowned Columbia school, worked to promote a useful new research methodology. This paper analyses these activities. In a series of papers, Lazarsfeld demonstrated that the roots of empirical research, the useful methodology he developed, lie in the work of early European scholars. Building on his belief that quantification does not need numbers, he showed that Hermann Conring, with his “classificatory statistics,” had predated Frédéric Le Play and his “ family budgets” and Adolphe Quételet and his “probability statistics” by almost two centuries. In another paper he highlighted the importance of Max Weber’s empirical studies on agrarian and industrial workers within the frame of his life work. His seminars at Columbia University with Robert K. Merton and at the Sorbonne with Raymond Boudon opened up transatlantic cooperation on empirical research between New York and Paris for decades to come.