two-step flow: a standalone construct

Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet introduced the idea in The People's Choice (1944), a panel study of the 1940 U.S. presidential campaign in which they found that mass media rarely changed voters' minds directly, and that ideas often appeared to flow from radio and print to a smaller set of attentive, engaged people, and from those people onward to the wider public through everyday conversation. Elihu Katz and Lazarsfeld named and elaborated the pattern as the two-step flow of communication in Personal Influence (1955), casting the intermediaries as opinion leaders: ordinary members of a group whom others turn to for guidance, who both attend to media more closely and pass along and interpret what they take from it. Katz's 1957 review in Public Opinion Quarterly restated the hypothesis and gathered the early evidence for it, framing it as a corrective to the then-common assumption that media acted directly and uniformly on isolated individuals. The construct is a landmark because it places interpersonal relationships between media and their audience, treating personal networks, not the message alone, as the channel through which mass communication comes to have effects. It concerns the flow of communication and influence among people, and is a separate matter from the later agenda-setting work on which issues media make salient.[1][2][3]

Unit

A two-stage model of influence: from media to opinion leaders, then from opinion leaders to the wider public

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied through panel surveys, sociometric questions that identify whom people consult, and self-reports of opinion leadership, tracing where influence on a decision came from