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The Women Who Proposed Two-Step Flow: A Gendered Revisit to the Intellectual History of a Mass Communication Theory


 
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1. Title Title of document The Women Who Proposed Two-Step Flow: A Gendered Revisit to the Intellectual History of a Mass Communication Theory
 
2. Creator Author's name, affiliation, country Esperanza Herrero; University of Murcia; Spain
 
3. Subject Discipline(s)
 
3. Subject Keyword(s) women, communication research, two-step flow, communication theories, gender, intellectual history, archival research
 
4. Description Abstract

Women were a key component of the research teams that worked on the first proposal of the two-step flow theory in the Bureau of Applied Social Research (Columbia University) in the 1940s and 1950s. However, in a perfect stance of historiographical epistemic injustice, they disappeared from the history of the field. Through archival analysis and critical-hermeneutic approaches, we recover the contributions of female researchers to the Erie County and Decatur projects, published as The People’s Choice and Personal Influence, respectively. These are the 2 projects that first proposed the two-step flow theory. In particular, we recover female contributions to both the fieldwork and theoretical debates. Ultimately, we analyze their work from a gender-informed perspective. To conclude, we argue that reinscribing women into the foundational narratives of communication research is a step toward a fairer, more pluralistic, and less individualistic comprehension of the historiography of the field.
 
5. Publisher Organizing agency, location USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism
 
6. Contributor Sponsor(s) Fulbright Spain; Spanish Government-Ministry of Universities; FEMICOMI-Research Project (funding by Spanish Government and European Union)
 
7. Date (YYYY-MM-DD) 2025-01-06
 
8. Type Status & genre Peer-reviewed Article
 
8. Type Type
 
9. Format File format PDF
 
10. Identifier Uniform Resource Identifier https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/23134
 
11. Source Title; vol., no. (year) International Journal of Communication; Vol 19 (2025)
 
12. Language English=en en
 
13. Relation Supp. Files Figure 1 (28KB)
Figure 2 (15KB)
 
14. Coverage Geo-spatial location, chronological period, research sample (gender, age, etc.)
 
15. Rights Copyright and permissions Copyright (c)