After acting as an instructor at Canisius College (1965–1966) and as a research associate at University of Wisconsin during his studies, Woelfel began work as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1968.
In 1988 he was director of research and founding fellow of the Institute for the Study of Information Science.
[3] Woelfel was also senior fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu (1977–1983),[4] a Fulbright scholar in the former Yugoslavia, and Senior fellow at the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York.
[5] He received the Alise-Bohdan Wynar Research Paper Award from the Association for Library and Information Science Education[6] in December 2001 and the Jesse M. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research in 2003.
[9] and in 2018 he published Galileo and its applications: Tools for the study of cognitive and cultural processes.
[10] Woelfel's early work focused on attitude formation and change.
At the University of Wisconsin he worked with Archie O. Haller[11] and Edward L. Fink on the "Significant Other Project," a project originated by Haller as part of the larger "Wisconsin model" of status attainment.
The Wisconsin Model is differentiated from other models of status attainment (e.g. those of Peter Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan,[12] Nan Lin,[13] and Mark Granovetter),[14] by its focus on intervening social psychological and communication variables.
Rather than assuming that individuals all seek high status and are helped or impeded in their quest by access to resources (social capital), the Wisconsin model suggests that different individuals aspire to different levels of educational and occupational attainment, and that these aspirations themselves are formed by a communication process whereby "significant others" communicate their expectations for the individual to him or her in various ways.
Although the role of significant others' expectations in influencing the attitudes of individuals had been long theorized, the Wisconsin Significant Other project was the first research to identify the specific significant others for a set of individuals, measure their expectations directly, and calculate the effect of those expectations on the aspirations of the individuals.
[15] In the process, the project developed the Wisconsin Significant Other Battery (WISOB) to identify specific significant others for any individual and to measure their educational and occupational expectations for him or her.
[17] Woelfel was instrumental in developing computer software such as CATPAC, a neural network that analyzes text, and the Galileo suite of programs used to measure beliefs and attitudes.
In many ways, Woelfel’s theory was the closest that any social science approach came to providing the basis for an end-to-end engineering solution for planning, conducting, and assessing the impact of communications on attitudes and behaviors.
"[19] Tracing scientific thought via two ancient Greek networks (Athenian and Ionian), Woelfel's 2013 book further considers how concepts are formed first by the collective and then communicated to individual minds through interaction among individuals.
In this book he argues the lack of progress exhibited in the social sciences is due to inadequacy of the underlying Athenian philosophy that continues to pervade the social sciences; he then shows how human processes can successfully be studied using the same methods used to study physical phenomena.
Galileo and its Applications: Tools for the Study of Cognitive and Cultural Processes.
"Significant others and their role relationships to students in a high school population."
In J. S. Picou, & R. E. Campbell (Ed.s), Career behavior of special groups (pp. 41–61).
"The Galileo System: A theory and method for analyzing cognitive processes."
"Artificial neural networks in policy research: A current assessment."
Greenwish, CT: Ablex Publishing Corp Woelfel, J., & Barnett, G. A.
"Procedures for controlling reference frame effects in the measurement of multidimensional processes."
"Basic premises of multidimensional attitude change theory: An experimental analysis."
"A multi-dimensional scaling based procedure for designing persuasive messages and measuring their effects."
), Readings in the Galileo System: Theory, Methods, and Applications (pp. 313–332).
"Dialogue on the nature of causality, measurement, and human communication theory."
"Effects of compound messages on global characteristics of Galileo spaces."
"Cognitive processes as motions in a multi-dimensional space: A general linear model."
"The Galileo System: A rational alternative to the dominant paradigm for social science research."
), Freiberger beiträge zur interkulturellen und wirtschaftskommunikation: A forum for general and Intercultural business communication.