He maintained a sociological focus during the early 1970s, co-writing an introductory sociology textbook that went into several editions. He co-authored a study of discrimination in university hiring practices, particularly in sociology departments (Wolfe et al., 1973), again with a strong emphasis on statistics and survey methods. However, his focus shifted. With the spread of television, he began to study the mass media. Specifically, he researched the effect of television on children's knowledge of occupational roles, and on the factors that influence the content and output of the American broadcasting systems. He and others established a formal definition of social expectations theory, applied to a model to predict that watching television attunes a viewer to social organization patterns of various groups, even if they "have never been members or never will be". Other works examined the potential relationships forged by mass media between the perception of social problems and their portrayal by the media. He wrote of his suggestion of a cultural norms theory in 1970, an idea that, in his estimation, "provided the foundation for the more comprehensive social expectations theory".