Robert K. Merton, Versatile Sociologist and Father of the Focus Group, Dies at 92 (original) (raw)
New York|Robert K. Merton, Versatile Sociologist and Father of the Focus Group, Dies at 92
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- Feb. 24, 2003
Robert K. Merton, one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th century, whose coinage of terms like ''self-fulfilling prophecy'' and ''role models'' filtered from his academic pursuits into everyday language, died yesterday. He was 92 and lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Merton gained his pioneering reputation as a sociologist of science, exploring how scientists behave and what it is that motivates, rewards, and intimidates them. By laying out his ''ethos of science'' in 1942, he replaced the entrenched stereotypical views that had long held scientists to be eccentric geniuses largely unbound by rules or norms. It was this body of work that contributed to Mr. Merton's becoming the first sociologist to win a National Medal of Science in 1994.
But his explorations over 70-odd years extended across an extraordinary range of interests that included the workings of the mass media, the anatomy of racism, the social perspectives of ''insiders'' vs. ''outsiders,'' history, literature and etymology. Though carried out with the detachment he admired in Emile Durkheim, the French architect of modern sociology, Mr. Merton's inquiries often bore important consequences in real life as well as in academics.
His studies on an integrated community helped shape Kenneth Clark's historic brief in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that led to the desegregation of public schools. His adoption of the focused interview to elicit the responses of groups to texts, radio programs and films led to the ''focus groups'' that politicians, their handlers, marketers and hucksters now find indispensable. Long after he had helped devise the methodology, Mr. Merton deplored its abuse and misuse but added, ''I wish I'd get a royalty on it.''
He spent much of his professional life at Columbia University, where along with his collaborator of 35 years, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, who died in 1976, he developed the Bureau of Applied Social Research, where the early focus groups originated. The course of his career paralleled the growth and acceptance of sociology as a bona fide academic discipline. As late as 1939 there were fewer than a 1,000 sociologists in the United States, but soon after Mr. Merton was elected president of the American Sociological Association in 1957, the group had 4,500 members.
Mr. Merton was sometimes called ''Mr. Sociology,'' and Jonathan R. Cole, a former student and the provost at Columbia, once said, ''If there were a Nobel Prize in sociology, there would be no question he would have gotten it.'' (Mr. Merton's son, Robert C. Merton, won a Nobel Prize in economics in 1997.)
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