The Research On Elihu Katz's Communication Idea

Burn in 1926,Elihu·Katz was an American Israel sociologist ,throughout his life ,he was absorbed in communication idea and made an enormous contribution to the development of the communication idea. His study covered multiple social sciences, integrated the social science and human science, the scope of his activities included many countries of Asia, Europe and America. The academic achievement of Katz highlighted that communication is an interdisciplinary subject, also demonstrated Research on communication should have the global vision. Katz adopted the interdisciplinary method to study a series of related research questions of communication, for example, the relationship among individual, group and media institute, or media effect and media imperialism and so on. Katz integrated with various research methods, studied the mediation process in different disciplines, together with other scholars, he applied social psychology and sociological approach to research audience . His work Personal influence embodied sociology, social psychology and sociometer model particularly. The relationship between communication and humanities had been greatly impressed by Katz, the most obvious example was his work Meaningful output, in this book Katz and his partners applied the method of combining communication and semantics ,which showed the possibility of the combination of administration school and critical school.But the academic circles pay less enough efforts on the study of Katz in China. The purpose of this paper is to make up the blank space of Elihu·Katz's communication idea, comb and summaries systematically his communication idea. Based on Katz's main works and used some important theory he had raised as the thread, integrated works with theory, on the basis of works to understand the theory and under the guidance of theory to familiar with works. Finally fully understand the content of the works as well as know the meaning of theory meticulously.Katz's Main contribution on communication research ,that is his communication idea, in the following aspects: first, Interpersonal Relation Theory; second, Opinion Leader Theory; third, research on Audience Theory. This paper will elaborate more details under this three themes systematically.