People's Choice by Paul F Lazarsfeld
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 followed 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 and 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 passed information on to less avid media consumers. The study paired the same interviewers and interviewees over time, leading to remarkable extended conversations featuring 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.
Boudon, Raymond: - Raymond Boudon is professor of sociology at the Sorbonne. He is the author of numerous works, including, in English translation, Theories of Social Change and The Critical Dictionary of Sociology, the latter of which is also published by the University of Chicago Press.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780231085830 |
| ISBN 10 | 0231085834 |
| Title | People's Choice |
| Author | Paul F Lazarsfeld |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Columbia University Press |
| Year published | 1988-01-01 |
| Number of pages | 223 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |