Abstract
Last year was the one hundred-year anniversary of the birth of Paul Lazarsfeld, the leader of the Marienthal project, and one of the creators of modern empirical, sociological research. The authors of the Marienthal study - Paul Lazarsfeld, Marie Jahoda and Hans Zeisel - applied a model of research that shows traces of the creative workshop that characterizes its place of origin - Central Europe.
The subject, the aim of the study, the amount of influence, the methodology used, and the manner of its origin indicate that it was not a piece of work that was looking to establish or to confirm a great new theory. The aim of this group of young Viennese researchers was to produce a detailed analysis of a specific social phenomenon - unemployment - in one of its specific forms, and to conduct a thorough study of the unemployed community of Marienthal.
The aim of this paper is to acquaint today's readers with the results of the Central European research mentioned here dating from the early stages of empirical sociology, and with the methods that the authors applied.