The Marienthal study attracted the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation, leading to a two-year traveling fellowship to the United States. From 1933-1935, Lazarsfeld worked with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and toured the united States, making contacts and visiting the few universities that had programs related to empirical social science research. It was during this time that Lazarsfeld met Luther Fry at the University of Rochester (which resulted in the inspiration for the research done in Personal Influence, written some twenty years later) and Robert S. Lynd]], who had written the Middletown study. Lynd would come to play a central role in helping Lazarsfeld emigrate to the United States, and would recommend him for the directorships of the Newark Center and the Princeton Office of Radio Research. Lazarsfeld contacted the Psychological Corporation, a non-profit organization devoted to bringing the techniques of applied psychology to business, and proposed a number of projects that were rejected as not having enough commercial value or being to involved. He also helped John Jenkins, an applied psychologist at Cornell University, translate an introduction to statistics Lazarsfel had written for his students in Vienna (Say It With Figures). Finally, he pursued research into the ideas presented in the widely-read "The Art of Asking Why" (1935), which explained Lazarsfeld's concept of "reason analysis."
While at Newark, Lazarsfeld was appointed head of the Princeton Office of the Radio Project, which was later moved to Columbia. In 1937, he first tried to have the project moved to newark, and when that request was turned down, split his time between the project and his institute in Newark. He feared (correctly, perhaps) that the institute would fail without his management. At the Project, Lazarsfeld expanded the aims postulated by the assistant directors, Hadley Cantril and Frank Stanton, and in a special issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology in February of 1939, edited by Lazarsfeld, he tied together some of the varied research the Project was engaged in. Lazarsfeld felt this pulbication was necessary because "no central theory was visible, and we began hearing rumors that important people questioned whether we knew what we were doing" (Lazarsfeld, 1969). But in the spring of 1939, the Rockefeller foundation officers were still unconvinced and "required more solid evidence of achievement" before they would renew funding. The result was Radio and the Printed Page. These two publications did much to consolidate and define the field of communication.
After a falling out with Cantril, which may have been financial in nature, the Radio Project moved to Columbia University, where it grew into the acclaimed Bureau for Social Research. At Columbia, the direction of research leaned toward voting, and a study of the Nobember 1940 vote was published as The People's Choice, a book that had a substantial effect on the nature of political research.
During the 1940s, mass communication entrenched itself as a field in its own right. 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. By the 1950s, there were increased concerns about the power of the mass media, and with Elihu Katz, Lazarsfel published Personal Influence, which propounded the theory of a two-step flow of communication, opinion leadership, and of community as filters for the mass media. Along with Robert K. Merton, he popularized the idea of a narcotizing dysfunction of media, along with its functional roles in society.
For the most part, Lazarsfeld's research addressed the individual decision-making process and how it was influenced by the mass media. The Marienthal study was an exception, being biased toward the community, but in all the studies carried out in localities after Marienthal (Sandusky, Elmira, and Decatur, for example), the individual was much more clearly the unit of analysis. While Lazarsfeld clearly did not see his own research agenda as the only approach to communication research, others criticized his "administrative research"--paid for by commercial and military funding—as an overwhelming move toward empirical, short-term, effects-based research.
The ascendency of administrative research provided an effective foil for critics. Theodor W. Adorno, who had worked under Lazarsfeld at the Radio Project, came to represent an intellectual tradition that contrasted with Lazarsfeld's own dedication to empiricism and willingness to collaborate with industry. Likewise, Lazarsfeld's focus on empirical discovery rather than grand theory ("abstract empiricism" in the words of C. Wright Mills) was one of the spurs that led Robert K. Merton to develop what he called "theories of the middle range."
Many place Lazarsfeld's main contribution to sociology as a methodological one. Given that the vast majority of his publications pertained to methodology, this is an argument easy to support. In particular, Lazarsfeld made great strides in statistical survey analysis and panel methods.
But it was the institutions that Lazarsfeld built during his early years in the US that he considered his creates achievement. He felt there was real need for research into what makes an "institution man": a person uniquely able to create and change academic isntitutions, and wrote about such a need in a number of papers near the end of his life.
In the end, he thought that his ideas of empirical research had not been as widely received as he might have hoped. In one of his last published papers, "Communication Research and Its Applications: A Postscript" (1976), Lazarsfeld lamented that the tide had turned against empirical research and that "while an increasing number of writers expressed the need [to make 'applications' a topic of research], it certainly was not the subject of popular demand among sociologists." One of Lazarsfeld's successful students was Barney Glaser - propounder of grounded theory (GT) - the world's most quoted method for analyzing qualitative data. Index formations and qualitative mathematics were subjects taught by Lazarsfeld and are important components of the GT method according to Glaser. James Samuel Coleman, an important contributor to social theories of education, was also a student of Lazarsfeld's at Columbia.
Lazarsfeld died in 1976. He had a son, Robert Lazarsfeld, now a professor at the University of Michigan, who published Positivity in Algebraic Geometry (Springer) in 2004.