This paper sets a series of large scale Housing surveys commissioned by the Department of the Environment (DOE) between 1977-1979 against the background of a developing national housing policy. It focusses on the particular character and role of the third phase of the sequence, the rationale for it and the aspects of national policy formation it is intended to support.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate conceptual and methodological problems raised by research on consumer satisfaction and dissatisfaction (C S/D) and to review its areas of application.
This paper deals with the concept of time perception and with specific research carried out to assess and measure some of the problems related to the temporal orientation of a city. Unlike chronological time, which is based on a universal, independent-of-life concept of time, the subjective perception of time is a cultural phenomenon based on the awareness and feelings that different people, groups and communities manifest in relation to the flow and duration of time. The research was conducted in 1977 on a sample of 259 adult citizens of Palermo. The technique adopted was the Semantic Differential, to find out the cognitive meaning of several concepts, including "the past", "the present" and "the future". Measurements of the direction of judgements, their intensity and their distances from other concepts provided a sufficiently broad framework for an analytical approach to the problems.
Social indicators have teen defined by Land (1975) as "Statistics which measure social conditions and changes therein over time for various segments of a population. By Social Conditions we mean both the external (social and physical) and the internal (subjective and perceptional) contexts of human existence in a given society". In this paper, I accept Land's definition, and by subjective social indicators refer to those conditions which Land depicts as "internal". This paper contends that the development of subjective social indicators has not led to any change in the power relationship between the government and the governed. It cannot give the public a powerful weapon with which to restrict the exercise of arbitrary power by an unresponsive government. Nor can it give the government the subtle manipulative device which it has sometimes been claimed to be. But, if the government has a will to be responsive, then subjective social indicators can provide a valuable safeguard against arbitrary or ill-informed decisions.
This paper covers the role of the survey researcher as a social forecaster. Social indicators have been derived from a qualitative and quantitative survey research system now operating in 14 different countries. These indicators include self fulfilment in work, social pluralism, desire for a better life, alienation from business, alienation from government. There is a movement to a more conservative stable society with a growing resistance to government control in education, housing and health. We argue that the social surveyor should be prepared to make predictions and to give views on public policy making. The social surveyor often has access to broadly based studies and his data can complement that of other social scientists.
At the ISB-Institut fur Jledizinische Informations- verarbeitung, Statistik und Biomathematik' in Munich our research group conducts pilot studies for a nationwide longitudinal study on side-effects of contraceptives. One of our objectives is to determine which topics can be investigated using population surveys. In 1975 we drew a random sample of the female population aged 12-45 years in the Munich area (n+639). This Pilotl sample was interviewed, using a standardized questionnaire. In 1976 and 1977 a self-completion questionnaire was mailed to the '75- sample' . The response to these questionnaires showed a marked dependency on the participation in the Project's medical examination program. Overall response rates, based on the initial sample, turned out to be: 81.4% in the second survey, 70.4% in the third survey.
At the ISB-Institut fur Jledizinische Informations- verarbeitung, Statistik und Biomathematik' in Munich our research group conducts pilot studies for a nationwide longitudinal study on side-effects of contraceptives. One of our objectives is to determine which topics can be investigated using population surveys. In 1975 we drew a random sample of the female population aged 12-45 years in the Munich area. The second part of the paper discusses approaches to measure social strata and reports our experience with the Social Self-Assessment-Scale (SSE).
Implementing social indicators is a new approach to estimate the well-being of a population. One of the focal concerns is the public security and administration of justice. The number of reported crimes is declining in Denmark more people are afraid of going out in the evenings and walking alone. The argument is that the statistics do not indicate the real level of crime because not all crimes are reported to the police. Studies of victims of crime can help estimating the dark figure of crime and identify groups with high and low victimisation rates. Two victim surveys have been carried out with representative samples of the Danish population aged 15 years and more.
The concern with Quality of Life and the large numbers of social indicators that are being identified as relevant to quality of life, raises political and ethical questions in respect of choices that must be made from among them. The necessity to choose may be superseded by the judicious use of indices which combine large numbers of indicators. The paper briefly describes a general theory of index construction and a method for the same which maintains the integrity of the theory. A theory of anomie is then outlined and the theory and method of index construction are illustrated with the construction of an index of anomie.