The Bureau of Applied Social Research was a social research institute at Columbia University which specialised in mass communications research. It grew out of the Radio Research Project at Princeton University, beginning in 1937. The Bureau's first director was Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. The project took on permanent form as the Office of Radio Research, moving to Columbia in 1939. It was renamed the 'Bureau of Applied Social Research' in 1944.
The bureau was closed in 1977, when its archives were merged into Columbia's Center for the Social Sciences which in turn became part of the Institute for Social and Economic Theory and Research in 1999, which in turn became part of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy in 2001.