Hazel Gaudet-Erskine

Hazel Gaudet-Erskine (born October 15, 1908 , † July 10, 1975 in Nevada Reno ) was an American social and communication scientist and member of the Princeton Radio Project.

Life

Hazel Gaudet was born on October 15, 1908. She studied psychology at George Washington University and was a pioneer in the field of audience and opinion research. She was part of the Princeton Radio Project at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University . In 1940 she married and moved to Reno, Nevada, turning away from research in advance to pursue political and social work. Between 1961 and 1975 she wrote The Polls column , which appeared regularly in the Public Opinion Quarterly . Hazel Gaudet-Erskine died on July 10, 1975 of complications from a serious illness.

Scientific career

Hazel Gaudet was an early member of the Princeton Radio Project at Princeton University, before moving to Columbia University as the Bureau of Applied Social Research . There, the social and communication scientist was mainly responsible for administration and data analysis. She also recruited and trained young interviewers and conducted some interviews herself. As a member of the Princeton Radio Project, she was also instrumental in co-authoring the Office of Radio Project's first two studies, The Invasion from Mars (1940) and The People's Choice (1944).

Following this work, she worked as an analyst in the Survey Division of the Office of War Information (OWI) in New York and London, where she led some research into the effectiveness of war propaganda.

She also worked in the research department of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and assisted Charles Wright Mills in his studies on the role of union leaders, which was published in 1948 under the name The New Man of Power .

The Invasion from Mars

The 1940 study published in The Invasion from Mars devoted to the study of the reactions after the performance of the radio play The War of the World from 1938. In communication studies, this study is one of the key works of media impact . Four people initially played an important role in the project: Paul Lazarsfeld , Hadley Cantril, Herta Herzog and Hazel Gaudet. While Lazarsfeld and Cantril negotiated research funding with those responsible at the Rockefeller Foundation, Herzog and Gaudet were responsible for organizing and analyzing the results. Herzog conducted a series of interviews with the audience of the radio play. Gaudet was responsible for the administration of the research project and the statistical analysis of all the data. Although the two women apparently made the greatest contribution to the study, Hadley Cantril is named as the main author of the work to this day, whereas Gaudet and Herzog are usually only briefly mentioned as collaborators.

135 people were interviewed as part of the study. 100 respondents who reacted in panic were then selected. The aim of the study was to identify the reasons for the sometimes panic reactions to the radio play The War of the World. When analyzing the results, the listeners could be classified into 4 different types:

1. Listeners who checked the internal evidence of the radio play.
2. Listeners who checked the broadcast through other information and learned that it was a radio play.
3. Listeners who tried to verify the program through other information but continued to believe that the broadcast was an authentic newscast for various reasons.
4. Listeners who made no attempt to review the broadcast or events.

For one, the majority of those who panicked believed what they were hearing without questioning it. On the other hand, the authors saw the reason for the panic in the fact that some switched on too late and thus overheard the announcement that it was a Halloween joke. The three scientists also analyzed which characteristics of the reception situation and which personal characteristics of the listener led to an increased fear potential. They found that the inability to think critically and to question the information were decisive for the reaction of the respective listener. However, according to the study, critical thinking could be overridden by a high degree of suggestibility and emotional insecurity.

Journalistic work

She benefited from Gaudet-Erskine's opinion polling experience in 1961 when she was given the task of restoring The Polls , a column that appears regularly in the Public Opinion Quarterly . Before the scientist took over the series, The Polls consisted mainly of a listing of survey results on a wide variety of topics without further analysis, interpretation or historical context. Gaudet-Erskine chose a contemporary topic for each issue and prepared it with survey data, analyzes and opinion trends. Above all, she dealt with controversially discussed issues of the time: civil rights, images of women, freedom of expression, religion and social welfare programs, etc.

Political commitment

With her move to Reno, Nevada, Gaudet-Erskine began to get involved more politically and socially. One of her first politically motivated acts was to get support for the ADC (Aid to Dependent Children) program. At the time, Nevada was the only state that did not participate in this state-sponsored program. In 1955, the legislature finally voted for Nevada to join.

At the same time, Gaudet-Erskine advocated better social benefits for old and blind people and for the transfer of responsibility for social assistance from the individual counties to the state level.

In 1952 and 1956, she was instrumental in both of Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaigns. Two years later she worked for the future Governor of Nevada Grant Sawyer . In this context, Gaudet-Erskine traveled to all 17 counties in the state of Nevada to get the necessary support for Sawyer. Gaudet-Erskine took over the organization, planning and analysis of Sawyer's campaigns. In the course of this activity, she was able to benefit from her academic career as an opinion researcher and the techniques she learned there. As a collaborator and advisor to Governor Grant Sawyer, she got him to appoint women and minority representatives to political positions. She was also a member of the Nevada State Social Committee.

In 1966 she organized the first meetings of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Nevada in her own living room until the organization was established, and in 1970 she was elected to represent Nevada on the national board of the ACLU. Between 1992 and 1994 she also held important positions in the Biennial Conference Committees and in the Nominating Committee in 1975.

Publications

• Hadley Cantril, Hazel Gaudet: Familiarity as a factor in determining the selection and enjoyment of radio programs. In: Journal of Applied Psychology. 23, No. 1, 1939, pp. 85-94.
• Hazel Gaudet: The favorite radio program. In: Journal of Applied Psychology. 23, No. 1, 1939, pp. 115-126.
• Hadley Cantril, Hazel Gaudet, Herta Herzog: The Invasion form Mars. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1940.
• Hazel Gaudet: High School Students Judge Radio Programs. In: Education. 60, 1940, pp. 639-646.
• Hazel Gaudet, Elmo C. Wilson: Who escapes the personal investigator. In: Journal of Applied Psychology. 24, No. 6, 1939, pp. 85-94.
• Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Hazel Gaudet: Who gets a job? In: Sociometry. 41, No. 1, 1941, pp. 64-77.
• Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Berelson Bernard, Hazel Gaudet: The People's Choice: How the Voter makes up his mind in a presidential campaign. Duel and Sloan, New York 1948.
• Hazel Erskine-Gaudet: A Revival: Reports from the Polls. In: Public Opinion Quarterly. 25, No. 1, 1961, pp. 128-139.

Between 1961 and 1975, Hazel Erskine Gaudet wrote The Polls , a regular column in the Public Opinion Quarterly.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Kathryn Mills: C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings. University of California Press, Berkley / Los Angeles / London 2000, ISBN 0-520-23209-7 , p. 354.
2. ^ Allison L. Rowland, Peter Simonson: The Founding Mothers of Communication Research: Toward a History of Gendered Assemblage. In: Critical Studies in Media Communication. 31, No. 1, 2014, pp. 3–26.
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Women in Media Research - Hazel Erskine (Gaudet) Out of the Question. Retrieved December 21, 2016.
4. ^ Allison L. Rowland, Peter Simonson: The Founding Mothers of Communication Research: Toward a History of Gendered Assemblage. In: Critical Studies in Media Communication. 31, No. 1, 2014, pp. 3–26.
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Eleanor Singer, Herbert H. Hyman, George Rudiak, Ralph L. Dentin, Elmer R. Rusco, Richard L. Siegel, John M. Aberasturi: In Memoriam: Hazel Erskine 1908–1975. In: The Public Opinion Quarterly. 39, No. 4, 1975, pp. 571-579.
6. ^ Jefferson Poland, Michael J. Socolow: War of the Words: The Invasion from Mars and Its Legacy for Mass Communication Scholarship . In: Joy Elizabeth Hayes, Kathleen Battles, Wendy Hilton-Morrow (Eds.): War of the Worlds to Social Media. Mediated Communication in Times of Crisis . Peter Lang, New York / Washington DC / Baltimore / Bern / Frankfurt / Berlin / Brussels / Vienna / Oxford 2013, ISBN 978-1-4331-1800-5 , pp. 35-56 .
7. ↑ Hadley Cantril: The Invasion of Mars . In: Dieter Prokop (Ed.): Media research . tape 2 : Wishes, target groups, effects . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-596-26552-5 , pp. 14-28 .
8. ↑ Charles T. Salmon (Ed.): Communication Yearbook. No. 35, Routledge, New York 2011, ISBN 978-0-415-89227-8 .