Herta Herzog

Herta Herzog-Massing (August 14, 1910 – February 25, 2010) was an Austrian-American social scientist specializing in communication studies. Her most prominent contribution to the field, an article entitled "What Do We Really Know About Daytime Serial Listeners?", is considered a pioneering work of the uses-and-gratifications approach and the cognitive revolution in media research. She was married to both Paul Lazarsfeld and later Paul Massing and was stepmother to Lazarsfeld's daughter, MIT professor Lotte Bailyn.

Originally a student of Karl Bühler at university in Vienna, Herzog elected to do her dissertation under Paul Lazarsfeld, a survey about the then-new medium of radio. She received her Ph.D. in psychology in 1932 despite developing a crippling case of polio, from which her right arm never fully recovered.

In 1935, she followed Lazarsfeld to the United States and married him there shortly after Lazarsfeld's divorce from Marie Jahoda. After a brief period as research assistant to Robert Staughton Lynd, Herzog joined the Radio Project as the Associate Director for consulting studies. At the Radio Project, she was part of the team of that conducted the groundbreaking research on Orson Welles' 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds in the study The Invasion from Mars. In her most famous work, "What Do We Really Know About Daytime Serial Listeners?", she surveyed housewives about their motivations for listening to radio soap operas, suggesting a conscious selection process on the part of the listener in a move away from the still dominant behaviorism theories of media effects of the time. While Herzog was a specialist of qualitative pilot studies and is even credited with developing the modern focus group methodology, her work is characterized throughout by a pragmatic mix of qualitative and quantitative methods.

...
Wikipedia