![]() His role in developing the focused interview would lead him to be called “the father of the focus group” when he died. Though primarily committed to an objectivist paradigm of social scientific knowledge, Merton’s early work on communication had critical elements as well, making it an interesting and nuanced hybrid that continues to reward readings today, evidenced in wide though often ritualistic citations by contemporary scholars. This entry focuses on his intellectual biography, his writings on communication, select interpretations of his work, and current uses to which his ideas are put. Merton was born Meyer Schkolnick, the Philadelphia-born son of Jewish Russian immigrants. Part of an assimilating generation, he adopted the name Robert King Merton, initially as a stage name (he was a talented amateur magician) and then legally when he was an undergraduate at Temple College (later Temple University). As a boy he was an avid reader who frequented the public library and came to love Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy, a book that later inspired Merton’s stem-winding tale, On the Shoulders of Giants (1964). He studied sociology under the tutelage of George E. ![]() Simpson, a sociologist of race on whose book, The Negro in the Philadelphia Press (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936), Merton worked as a research assistant, which can retroactively be viewed as his first experience with media studies.
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