The Marienthal study attracted the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation, leading to a two-year traveling fellowship to the United States.

From 1933 to 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.

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.

He also helped John Jenkins, an applied psychologist at Cornell University, translate an introduction to statistics Lazarsfeld 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".

This produced studies such as two long reports to the dairy industry on factors influencing the consumption of milk; and a questionnaire to let people assess whether they shop too much (for Cosmopolitan magazine).

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.

With his third wife, married in 1949, Patricia Kendall [fr], he had a son, Robert Lazarsfeld (born 1953), who was professor of mathematics at Stony Brook University, and who published Positivity in Algebraic Geometry (Springer) in 2004.

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 and a future president of the American Sociological Association, was also a student of Lazarsfeld's at Columbia.

Paul Lazarsfeld's most important contribution, in his own opinion as well, was the beta version of a research institution that was based within a University setting.

Lazarsfeld's “most important methodological contributions were the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer and focus group interviewing” according to Everett Rogers.

He contributed to data analysis with a variety of techniques such as the 2x2 contingency tables, frequency analyses, scatter plots, and mixed methods like focus groups.

Lazarsfeld emphasized that a research institution is capable of existing in an organized fashion but that the commandeering and leadership really dictated the success of it.

Another negative repercussion of having the type of leadership that Lazarsfeld provided was that the organization and its methodology was determined by his preferences—not allowing in this case for statistics to be utilized and that the data sets were unable to be replicated and generalized.

[11] Apparently the pair had little contact until Merton and his wife came to dinner at the Lazarsfeld's Manhattan apartment on Saturday evening, November 23, 1941.

Upon arrival Lazarsfeld explained to Merton that he had been just asked by the US government's Office of New Facts and Figures to evaluate a radio program.

"[11] Lazarsfeld was using the famous Stanton–Lazarsfeld Program–Analyzer, to record the responses of listeners, and in the ensuing interviews they conducted, Merton was instrumental in ensuring questions were properly answered.

"[13] The remainder of Lazarsfeld and Merton's paper discusses structure of ownership and operation of the mass media specific to the US—especially the fact that in the case of magazines, newspapers, and radio, advertising "supports the enterprise": "Big business finances the production and distribution of mass media [...] he who pays the piper generally calls the tune".

[13] : 236  They point out the ensuing problems of social conformism, and consider the impact upon popular taste (a controversy which rages unabated until the present).

The final section of the paper considers a topic of great salience in the post–World War II period, propaganda for social objectives.

Lazarsfeld and Merton's classic essay has long been criticized as a high point of the dominant effects tradition in communication theory.

However, revisionist accounts have now drawn attention to the mix of ideas it contains from "critical" communication traditions, as much as empirical, methodological, and quantitative approaches.