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The Pursuit of Happiness – Introduction

  • In 1950, Elihu Katz submitted his MA thesis called >The Happiness Game – A Content Analysis of Radio Fan Mail< at Columbia University. It was supervised by Leo Löwenthal, and drew on recently published work by Paul Lazarsfeld, Robert Merton, and Erich Fromm. The topic for the thesis came from Löwenthal, who, as Katz now recalls, was then preparing to become Director of Research for Voice of America. Somehow, he obtained from CBS, perhaps through Lazarsfeld, several thousand letters sent in to the network during the early months of 1948. He was interested in letters sent by listeners in anticipation of such mail landing on his desk in his new position. The letters were sorted into different bundles and assigned to various graduate students for analysis. It was a happy chance that the bundle assigned to Katz were letters sent in by listeners (overwhelmingly female) in response to a request from a popular radio broadcaster of the day, Ted Malone. Malone asked regular listeners to his daytime show to note whenever they felt happy across the whole of February 1948 (a leap-year) and, at the end of the month, to send him a letter telling of their happiest day. Over two thousand letters were received, and from this, a sample of 236 letters was selected and submitted to a careful content analysis which formed the substance of the thesis. Immediately following this, Katz entered the doctoral program in the Department of Sociology and began to work with Lazarsfeld, a collaboration which culminated in Katz’s work on the Decatur survey material that Lazarsfeld had commissioned in 1943. It became his doctoral thesis and was published as >Personal Influence< (1955), co-authored by Katz and Lazarsfeld – a landmark in American sociological literature.

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Metadaten
Author:Paddy Scannell
Parent Title (English):International Journal of Communication, Vol. 6 (2012), pp. 1262-1269. [Online ISSN 1932-8036] [ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1629/762]
Document Type:Articles
Language:English
Year of first Publication:2013
Release Date:2024/04/04
Format:PDF-file to download
IdNo:Scannell_P_2012
Writings about Erich Fromm (Secondary Literature):Articles / Artikel
Erich Fromm's Library and Erich Fromm Archive:Articles / Artikel
Licence (German):
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