From Advanced Training Center to the Predominant Paradigm of Post-war Sociological Methodology. Road of the Columbia School from the Defeat to the Victory
Abstract
In the early 1950s BASR at Columbia University applied to become a training centre in sociological research for doctoral students. In 1950 Paul Lazarsfeld and R.
K. Merton submitted a Memorandum to Columbia University that contained a well-argued proposal for BASR to be transformed into an Advanced Training Centre in Social Research.
However, the Ford Foundation, which was funding the entire event, selected a rival project. In the western United States, in Palo Alto, California, it founded a new institution called the Center for Advanced Studies, devoting 3.5 million USD to its construction.
Following this decision Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton prepared and presented a project for the management of Columbia University called the "Planning Project for Advanced Training" (PPAT), for which the university managed to obtain 120,000 USD from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations. The project aimed to focus mainly on specific publications that could then be used to train doctoral students in the work of research.
Lazarsfeld and his methodological school used almost all of the project's resources to publish several key methodological monographs through the renowned Free Press. Lazarsfeld, with the help of R.
K. Merton and the university, managed by means of these focused publishing activities that supported examples of applied work by BASR and Columbia University to advance the Columbia school of sociology's methodological model as the leading paradigm of sociological research and doctoral education during the first two post-war decades in the USA and Western Europe.