Social Indicators

Kenneth C. Land

Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 9. (1983), pp. 1-26.

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Ann. Rev. Sociol. 1983. 9:l-26
Copyright O I983 by Annual Reviews Inc. AN rights reserved

SOCIAL INDICATORS
Kenneth C Land
Population Research Center and Department of Sociology, The University
of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712

ABSTRACT
This paper reviews the development of the field of social indicators from its
origins in the 1960s to the present. Three classes of social indicators are
identified: normative welfare indicators, which focus on direct measures of
welfare and are subject to the interpretation that if they change in the right
direction while other things remain equal things have gotten better or
people are better off; satisfaction indicators, which measure psychological
satisfaction, happiness, and life fulfillment by using survey research instru-
ments that ascertain the subjective reality in which people live; and the most
inclusive category, descriptive social indicators, which are indexes of social
conditions (i.e. contexts of human existence) and changes therein for vari-
ous segments of a population. Correspondingly, two conceptions of how
social indicators are to be interpreted and used are discussed: One, which
emphasizes the policy-analytic uses of social indicators, presumes that the
proper relationship of social indicators to social policy occurs at the level
of operating or managing organizations; the other, which emphasizes the
uses of social indicators in social reporting, presumes that the proper role
of social indicators is public enlightenment and the formation of general as
opposed to operational policy. Three sociological contributions to the de-
scriptive social indicators/enlightenment approach are described: the devel-
opment of replication and longitudinal studies, the production of analytical
studies of social change and social reports, and the creation of formal
models for the analysis of data on social change. Current research problems
that are identified include the development of social accounting systems, the
construction of indicators of institutional values and structures, and the
production of improved social forecasts and forecasting techniques. It is
concluded that, while issues of public concern may change from time to
time, the critical public and private sectors continue to need statistical
information about current social conditions and trends.
2 LAND

INTRODUCTION
The term social indicators was born and given its initial meaning in an
attempt, undertaken by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to detect (evaluate)
and anticipate (assess) the nature and magnitude of the second-order conse-
quences of the space program for American society. The Academy's man-
date was to investigate the social, economic, and technological conse-
quences that were not implied either by the stated objectives of the program
(unintended consequences) or by the technological discoveries emerging
immediately from the program (indirect consequences). Several scholars
involved in this project soon became frustrated by the lack of sufficient data
to detect such effects. Furthermore, both a systematic conceptual frame-
work and a methodology for sophisticated analysis were missing. Conse-
quently, some of those involved in the Academy project attempted to
develop a system of social indicators-statistics, statistical series, and other
forms of evidence-with which to detect and anticipate social change. The
results of this generalized version of the project were published (Bauer
1966) in a volume that inaugurated the contemporary period of social-
indicators research.
The appearance of this volume was not an isolated event. Interest in
social indicators was further buttressed by publication of the report of the
National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress
(1966). In the process of assessing the effects of factory automation on the
economy and society, the Commission (1966: 95-97) commented on the
lack of a system for charting social changes and advocated that the United
States Government establish a "system of social accounts" that would
facilitate a cost-benefit analysis of more than the market-related aspects of
society already indexed by the National Income and Product Accounts. At
about the same time, Sheldon & Moore (1968: 3; see also Moore & Sheldon
1965) took note of far-reaching changes in the structure of American society
and assembled a massive volume of essays on indicators of social change.
Space limitations prevent mention of all the proposals for, and contributions
to, research in social indicators touched off by this initial round of publica-
tions (an annotated bibliography published by Wilcox et a1 in 1972 con-
tained over 1,000 items).
This sharp impulse of interest in social indicators has historically impor-
tant social-science precursors with links to the events of the 1960s. Gener-
ally speaking, it grew out of the movement towards collection and
organization of national social, economic, and demographic data that began
in Western societies during the 17th and 18th centuries and accelerated in
the twentieth century (Gross 1966; Carley 1981:14-1 5). A more proximate
 SOCIAL INDICATORS 3

and sociologically germane precedent is the work of William F. Ogburn and

his collaborators at the University of Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s on
the theory and measurement of social change (Land 1975b). As chairman
of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends, Ogburn super-
vised production of the two-volume Recent Social Trends (1933), a prece-
dent-setting contribution to social reporting. Ogburn's ideas about the
measurement of social change influenced several of his students-notably
Albert D. Biderman, Otis Dudley Duncan, Albert J. Reiss, and Eleanor
Bernert Sheldon-who have played major roles in the emergence and devel-
opment of the field of social indicators during the past two decades.

DEFINITIONS OF SOCIAL INDICATORS

Shortly after the appearance of the publications cited above there arose a
chorus of proposals concerning the development of social indicators. Dun-
can (1969: 1) dubbed it a social movement. This enthusiastic response was
due both to the successes and to the increasingly apparent limitations of
economic indicators. In the early 1960s, economists, using indicators from
the National Income and Product Accounts along with econometric mod-
els, were able to suggest economic policies (e.g. tax cuts) that had the
intended result of expanding the gross national product (GNP) by about the
expected amount (de Neufville 1975). These successes suggested to social
scientists that an analogous set of "social" indicators might be similarly
used in the manipulation of social policy.
But the more successful economic indicators became, the more obvious
were their limitations as measures of general social welfare or well-being.
They failed to reflect the quality of life, the dimension of equity, or such
side-effects of economic prosperity as environmental pollution (Carley
1981: 17). Some of the more specific limitations of economic indicators
identified by critics (e.g. Gross 1966) are that: (a) such measures as the
GNP cannot be equated with psychological satisfaction, happiness, or life
fulfillment; (b) market valuations of goods and services (i.e, their observed
or imputed prices) are not necessarily related to their contributions to social
well-being; (c) nonmarket activities and impacts of market activities tend
to be excluded from consideration; ( d )distributional considerations tend to
be obscured in the GNP averages; and (e) GNP indicators assume the
existence of a social rule system, incorporating values, norms, and struc-
tures governing human behavior, but they do not measure this, nor do they
measure the interdependence between changes in this system and the econ-
omy.
Such criticisms have produced two general reactions: attempts to alter
the National Income and Product Accounts to reflect well-being issues, and
4 LAND

efforts to develop indicators and zccounts that complement the useful (and
inescapable) economic indicators. These two approaches still characterize
much current social-indicators research.
Normative Welfare Indicators
Taking as its premise the proposition that social indicators should relate
directly to social-policy-making considerations, an early definition by the
economist Mancur Olson characterized a social indicator as a
statistic of direct normative interest which facilitates concise, comprehensive and bal-
anced judgments about the condition of major aspects of a society. It is, in all cases, a
direct measure of welfare and is subject to the interpretation that if it changes in the
'right' direction, while other things remain equal, things have gotten better, or people
are better off. Thus, statistics on the numbers of doctors or policemen could not be social
indicators, whereas figures on health or crime rates could be. (US Department of Health,
Education and Welfare 1969: 97).

In the language of policy analysis (see e.g. Fox 1974: 120-23), social indica-
tors are "target" or "output" variables, towards changes in which some
public policy (program, project) is directed. Such a use of social indicators
requires that (a) the society agrees about what needs improving; (b) it is
possible to decide unambiguously what "getting better" means; and (c) a
high degree of aggregation in the indicators exists to facilitate national-level
analyses.
Experienced social analysts quickly perceived difficulties in meeting these
requirements. 0 . D. Duncan (1969: 3-4) observed that the emphasis on
aggregation may be premature. Sheldon & Freeman (1970: 98) argued that
what is of "direct normative interest" today may not be so next year;
furthermore, the requirement that indicators be "direct measures of wel-
fare" rules out many variables that may be relevant to an understanding of
the indicator. This requirement presupposes that "outputs" can be unam-
biguously identified and ignores the fact that the output of one social
process may be the input of another.
Satisfaction Indicators
An alternative approach to the definition of social indicators has its roots
in The Human Meaning of Social Change (Campbell & Converse 1972). A
companion to the Sheldon & Moore (1968) volume, this collection of essays
argued that the direct monitoring of key social-psychological states (atti-
tudes, expectations, feelings, aspirations, and values) in the population is
necessary to an understanding of social change. In a subsequent volume,
Campbell et a1 (1976: 4) connected this proposition to the notion of quality
of life: "The research with which this book is concerned derives from the
conviction that the relationship between objective conditions and psycho-
logical states is very imperfect and that in order to know the quality of life
 SOCIAL INDICATORS 5

experience it will be necessary to go directly to the individual himself for

his description of how his life feels to him." While the term "quality of life"
is seldom precisely defined, it typically involves "a sense of achievement in
one's work, an appreciation of beauty in nature and the arts, a feeling of
identification with one's community, a sense of fulfillment of one's poten-
tial" (Campbell et a1 1976: 1).
In this approach, social indicators seek to measure psychological satisfac-
tion, happiness, and life fulfillment by directly ascertaining the "subjective
reality" in which people live. Towards this end, two major methodological
studies (Andrews & Withey 1976; Campbell et a1 1976) have explored the
utility of various survey and analytic techniques in mapping individuals'
feelings of satisfaction with various aspects ("domains") of their experi-
ences. These studies examined domains ranging from the highly specific
(house, family, etc) to the global (life-as-a-whole). Other applications of the
techniques produced by these studies have appeared in the recent journal
literature (e.g. Andrews & Inglehart 1979; Michalos 1980; Headey 1981).
The link between changes in objective conditions and psychological states
is both indeterminate and paradoxical. For instance, Easterlin (1973) and
0. D. Duncan (1975a) found that, while higher income levels are associated
with higher levels of happiness or satisfaction for individuals in a given
country at a given time, higher per capita levels of national income do not
produce higher average levels of national satisfaction over time or cross
sectionally. Because of this and similar paradoxes, subjective indicators will
likely be a permanent fixture in social-indicators research. However, from
the standpoint of a general theory of social change, it is not yet clear that
the most desirable subjective indicators are satisfaction indexes as opposed
to indicators of expectations, aspirations, attitudes, or values. Furthermore,
it is not clear that satisfaction indexes provide an unambiguous criterion for
the formulation of public policy. For instance, there may be circumstances
in which it is not possible to maximize both individual and collective
satisfactions (see the discussion in Land & Juster 1981: 18). A case in point
is when the satisfactions of some are reduced by integrated neighborhoods.
In addition, research to date (e.g. Andrews and Withey 1976) shows that
the areas of life most crucial to an individual's overall life satisfaction are
those least amenable to public policy actions.

Descriptive Social Indicators

A third approach to the definition of social indicators, building upon the
Ogburn legacy of research on social trends, focuses on social measurements
and analyses designed to improve our understanding of what the main
features of society are, how they interrelate, and how these features and
their relationships change (Sheldon and Parke 1975: 696). 0. D. Duncan
6 LAND

(quoted in Sheldon 1971: 430) emphasizes that the bedrock of social indica-
tors consists of social measurements, upon which a variety of edifices may
be constructed:
What we must have, minimally, are quantitative statements about social conditions and
social processes, repeatedly available through time, the reliability and validity of which
are competently assessed and meet minimal standards. If such statements-"social mea-
surements"+an be organized into accounts. . . so much the better. If some combi~ation
of measurements or quantities derived from elementary magnitudes can be shown to
serve a clear interpretive purpose as "indicators," so much the better. As accounting
schemes, models of social processes, and indicators are developed and tested, our idea
of what to measure will, of course, change. But that does not alter the principle that the
basic ingredients are the measurements themselves. We are talking about information,
the processing of information, and the reporting of processed information.

In this view, social indicators are simply indexes of social conditions and
changes therein over time for various segments of a population. By social
conditions are meant both the external (physical and social) and the internal
(subjective and perceptional) contexts of human existence in a given society
(Land 1975b: 14). Early contributions to this perspective include Biderman
(1966), Sheldon & Moore (1968), 0. D. Duncan (1969), Ferriss (1969, 1970,
1971), Sheldon & Freeman (1970), and Campbell & Converse (1972).
Because it does not require that social indicators be defined solely in
terms of objective or subjective well-being, this definition is more general
than those cited above. It produces descriptive social indicators-indexes
of the state of a society and the changes taking place within it. Illustrations
can be found in Social Indicators 1976 and Social Indicators 1 1
1(US De-
partment of Commerce 1978, 1980). These volumes report dozens of statis-
tical series on such topics as health, housing, public safety, schooling, and
social participation. Although descriptive social indicators may be more or
less directly related to the well-being goals of government policies or pro-
grams, they are not limited to such uses.
As statistics, descriptive social indicators usually take one of four forms,
or some combination thereof: ( a ) state-occupancy rates-indexes of the
prevalence of some social state in the population (e.g. percent of the popula-
tion that is disabled); ( 6 ) transition rates-rates of transition between social
states (e.g, the probability of surviving from age x to age x 1); (c) +
occurrence/exposure rates (e.g. the number of births per 1000 females aged
15-44) or ratios (e.g. the proportion of deaths within a given year attribut-
able to a particular cause); and (d) indexes summarizing population or
subpopulation data in forms a, b, or c (e.g. median family income in
constant dollars) (cf. Land 1979: 219-28). These can be ordered by degree
of abstraction from those that require only one or two data series and little
processing (e.g, the age-specific death rates for a sequence of age groups in
 SOCIAL INDICATORS 7

successive intervals of time) to those that involve the more complicated

processing of several data series into a single summary index (e.g. a life
expectancy index). Descriptive social indicators can be formulated at any
of these levels of abstraction (cf. United Nations Statistical Office 1975: 27).
This is analogous to the practice in descriptive economic indicators,
wherein "tons of salable coal shipped" may be used as a simple index of the
output of the coal-mining industry whereas "gross national produce in
constant dollars" is a highly processed indicator of economic activity.

THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO SOCIAL

INDICATORS
Several other definitional distinctions, pertaining to the relations of social
indicators to public policies, government programs, and analytical models
of social change, have appeared in the literature (see e.g. Land 1971; Carlisle
1972; Sheldon & Land 1972; Land 1975a, b). However, in terms of the uses
to which the indicators are put, the three categories described above com-
prise the main contemporary distinctions. To understand these uses re-
quires a more detailed description of the theoretical approaches underlying
the definitions.

Extensions of Policy Analysis and Microeconomics

From the outset, normative welfare indicators have been surrounded by
policy-analytic/microeconomic theories and concepts. Initially, the idea
was that social indicators could be linked to public programs via input-
output tables called "policy accounts":

The fact that rational policy necessitates linking social indicators to program inputs means
that social indicators alone do not provide all of the quantitative information needed
for effective decision making. Ultimately, we must integrate our social indicators into
policy accounts which would allow us to estimate the changes in a social indicator that
could be expected to result from alternative levels of expenditure on relevant public pro-
grams.

Of course, it was recognized that social conditions are affected by things

other than public programs:

The condition of an aspect of a nation depends, not only on a particular public program, but
also on many other things. Health and life expectancy, for example, depend not only on
public health programs, but also on private medical expenditures, the standard of living, the
8 LAND

quality of nutrition, the exposure to contagious diseases, and the like. Thus, to determine the
output of a public program we normally have to solve something like what the econometri-
cian would call the "specification problem"; we have to identify or distinguish those changes
in the social indicator due to the changed levels of expenditure on the public program. This
is often not a tractable task, but it could contribute much to truly rational decision mak-
ing. (Both quotations taken from US Department of Health, Education and Welfare 1969:
101).

Research in this tradition has recently taken two main forms.

The first travels under the rubric of nationalgoals accounting (Terleckyj
1975). It attempts to give explicit definition to national goals and priorities,
to estimate progress toward the achievement of these goals, and to measure
the cost of further achievement. This is done by (a) identifying national
social concerns and indicators to measure conditions relevant to those
concerns (more will be said about this in the next subsection); ( 6 ) projecting
baseline trends in these conditions and in resources potentially available for
altering them; (c) estimating the costs and effects of discretionary govern-
ment programmatic activities affecting social conditions; and (d) calculat-
ing the maximum feasible impact of combinations of discretionary activities
that can be undertaken, given resource constraints, taking into account
multiple consequences of programs, nonadditivity of effects, and other com-
plications.
One of the weakest links in this program is the projection of baseline
trends in social conditions. Terleckyj does this crudely (1975). Similarly,
because social conditions (and changes therein) depend on many things
other than government programs, there are severe problems in estimating
the changes in social conditions that can be expected from various levels of
government expenditure.
Partly in recognition of this, recent research on resource accounting
systems has adapted the household production and consumption frame-
work of "the new home economics" to take into account the ways in which
"households" combine commodities purchased in the market (e.g. grocer-
ies) with capital stocks (e.g. refrigerators, ranges, cookware, and utensils)
and time expenditures in activities (e.g. cooking) to produce household
commodities (e.g. meals) that produce feelings of satisfaction (see e.g.
Juster, Courant & Dow 1981; Terleckyj 1981). In this way, it is anticipated
that the effects of changes in levels of living, consumption patterns, life
styles, etc can be traced through household production and consumption
activities to their impacts on the "ultimate well-being outcomes" (e.g.
length of healthy life). Furthermore, by postulating the dependency of
individual or household satisfaction levels on the latter, it is possible to
incorporate the social-psychological tradition of research on satisfaction
within this framework.
 SOCIAL INDICATORS 9

Such a system requires voluminous data on household time expenditures

on a large array of "production" activities (see below). Moreover, the valid-
ity of the system rests on two assumptions. The first is that it is meaningful
to apply economic concepts of production and consumption, and the related
theoretical apparatus, to nonmarket activities-i.e. that nonmarket activi-
ties and related social structures organization can be adequately protrayed
by economic concepts and models. Second, this approach assumes that the
effects of the "many other things" that impact on social conditions can be
aggregated to obtain societal-level effects on social conditions-i.e. that
there is no "fallacy of composition" in extrapolating from individual
household behaviors to societal-level conditions.

Enlightenment and Social Reporting

Several other theoretical approaches to social indicators have been built
upon a microeconomics foundation. For instance, Fox (1974; Fox & Ghosh
1981) applied utility maximization theory to develop a "monetary index of
total income" as the sum of an individual's wage (and other real-dollar)
income plus an imputed dollar value for the psychic satisfaction obtained
from various activities (e.g. getting a haircut) in various settings (e.g. a
barbershop), and Liu (1976) used microeconomic concepts to define a
"quality of life production function" from which he computed a global
"quality of life" index for US metropolitan communities. All of these ap-
proaches rest upon the presumption that the proper relationship of social
indicators to social policy occurs at a level of operating or managing orga-
nizations.
An alternative perspective assumes that the proper role of social indica-
tors is enlightenment-i.e. they contribute to public understanding of social
conditions and social change and to the formulation of general as opposed
to operational policy (Biderman 1970; Sheldon & Parke 1975). This ap-
proach emphasizes the use of social reporting (a) to describe social trends;
(b) to explain why an indicator series behaves as it does and how this
knowledge affects interpretation; (c) to highlight important relationships
among series; and (d) to suggest the consequences reasonably attributable
to changes in a series (Parke & Seidman 1978: 15).
Social reporting has motivated the development of descriptive social
indicators since Ogburn's time. The contemporary era of social reporting
dates from the publication of Indicators ofSocial Change (Sheldon & Moore
1969) and Toward a Social Report (1969). Since then, the federal govern-
ment has periodically published compendia of stastistical series on major
social trends in the United States (US Department of Commerce 1974,
1977, 1980). These have been supplemented at the federal level by numerous
special reports and by social reports at the state and local levels. Many other
10 LAND

national governments and several international agencies also have pub-

lished social reports (for surveys of these, see Zapf 1976 and Glatzer 1981).
Although all of these reports present statistical information depicting
important aspects of current social conditions and their underlying histori-
cal trends and conditions, they vary greatly in the amounts of attention
given to the explanatory and interpretive goals of social reporting. For
instance, the US Government reports cited above tend to interpret only data
characteristics and limitations. Special volumes of interpretative essays,
written by experienced researchers in various substantive areas, have ac-
companied the two most recent entries in this series (Taeuber 1978, 1981).
Drawing on large bodies of empirical research, analytic models, concepts,
and theories, these essays drive home the inescapable heterogeneity of the
"social" in social indicators.

Dimensions of Theory and the Definition of Social Indicators

Space limitations prevent further elaboration on these two different ap-
proaches to social indicators. Nonetheless, even these brief characteriza-
tions provide a background for understanding the genesis of the definitions
of social indicators described above. For, if one holds the social-engineering
objectives of the policy-analytic/microeconomicsapproach to social indica-
tors, then one's interest is in normative welfare indicators. Furthermore, if
one embeds this approach in a household production theory in which the
"final outputs" of individual and joint production are consumed to provide
utility, then it follows that subjective satisfaction indexes can be absorbed
within the same framework. On the other hand, if one assumes the enlight-
enment goals of social reporting, then one's focus naturally falls on descrip-
tive indicators of social conditions and trends and on interpretations and
explanations thereof.
In either case, certain presuppositions may be hidden. For instance, the
definition of normative welfare indicators presupposes substantial consen-
sus on "social objectives or goals." Similarly, the definition of global quality
of life indicators presupposes the ability to aggregate meaningfully across
individuals and social conditions. Finally, the identification of key variables
that determine social conditions and changes presupposes causal knowledge
about the processes generating the conditions. Whether or not these pre-
sumptions are factually valid is an empirical question.

SOCIOLOGICAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO
SOCIAL-INDICATORS RESEARCH
In spite of their differences in orientation, however, it would be misleading
to portray the social-engineeringand social-reporting perspectives on social
 SOCIAL INDICATORS 11

indicators as opposites. Many sociologists working in a social-reporting

mode have a long-run goal similar to that of policy-analysts/microecsno-
mists working in a social-engineering mode-namely, to devise explana-
tions of social trends that lead to the development of policies for coping
with, altering, and/or controlling social change. But, perhaps because they
come from a discipline rich in empirical studies of diverse social phenom-
ena, sociologists tend to be skeptical about the possibility of developing
social indicator models based on microeconomic concepts that lead to
effective policies. Instead they emphasize the need for better and more
complete measurements and analyses. Again, this attitude found its ex-
pression in Ogburn's work over fifty years ago:

Our various studies of statistical time series show a very important thing, namely, that the
measured trend of events and phenomena is the best guide that we yet have for the prediction
of the future. Knowledge is the antithesis of mystery and uncertainty. And the knowledge of
what has occurred and of what is happening is the safest guide we have. With more complete
statistics and with better measurement we shall attain fuller knowledge of what is happening
to us and where we are going. Only with these shall we be in a position even to begin to speak
of control. (Ogbum 1929 [1964]: 101).

Working out of this tradition of social measurement, contributions by soci-

ologists to research on social indicators have concentrated on the develop-
ment of measures of social conditions and their use in longitudinal designs,
analytical studies of social change and social reporting, and formal models
of social change.

Replication and Longitudinal Data Series

From the limited experience of the past few years, it might be assumed by
a novice sociologist that the idea of repeating major community studies and
national sample surveys to facilitate the measurement of long-term trends
and other social changes has always been accepted among social scientists
and statisticians. That this was not the case even two decades ago is borne
out by recalling the reaction of the contributors to the Bauer (1966) volume
to the task with which they were charged. The dearth of repeated studies
and of other data useful in the measurement of change led 0. D. Duncan
(1969: 10) to assert: "Obviously, a minimum requirement for measuring
change is that the same variable be measured at two distinct points in
time. . . . In addition . . ., the two (or more) measurements must be suffi-
ciently comparable and reliable that the inference of change from the differ-
ence of their magnitudes is trustworthy to an acceptable degree of
confidence." Duncan went on to argue that an improved ability to measure
social change is fundamental to progress in the field of social reporting. He
12 LAND

proposed that a strategy of replicating baseline studies would make optimal

use of existing data sources and cited several examples of existing baseline
studies that might merit replication. Finally, Duncan formulated guidelines
for selecting and replicating baseline studies.
In the years since publication of Duncan's monograph, much of his
research program has been realized. First, several major studies done prior
to 1969 have been replicated. Examples are the Duncan, Schuman & Dun-
can (1973) replication of items from previous Detroit Area surveys; the
Featherman & Hauser (1978) replication of Blau & Duncan's (1967) study
of occupational mobility patterns of American males; Davis's (1975) repli-
cation of Stouffer's (1955) study of Americans' attitudes towards civil liber-
ties; and the current replication by T. Caplow and associates (Caplow &
Bahr 1982) of the Lynd & Lynd (1937) studies of Middletown (Muncie,
Indiana). Second, several major national sample surveys have been set up
on a repeated basis both within government agencies and in academic
survey organizations (for a comprehensive survey of existing social indica-
tor data series, see Taeuber & Rockwell, 1982). Examples are the (currently
triennial) National Survey of Family Growth taken by the National Center
for Health Statistics since 1973 and linked to earlier fertility surveys (P,A.A.
Aflairs, Summer, 1981: 3); the General Social Survey (currently biennial)
taken by the National Opinion Research Center since 1972 (under National
Science Foundation sponsorship) and linked to prior national opinion sur-
veys (Smith 1980); and the American National Election Study (currently
biennial) taken by the University of Michigan Survey Research Center since
1972 (under National Science Foundation support) and linked to earlier
election studies (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Re-
search, 1980-81: 185-92).
Sociologists have also been active in the application of two other lon-
gitudinal research strategies to produce data sets that can be analyzed for
social reporting purposes: panel and event-history designs. Examples of the
former are the Sewell-Hauser Panel on Wisconsin Youth (Sewell & Hauser
1975); the National Longitudinal Study of Labor Force Experience (Parnes
1972); and the Panel Study in Income Dynamics (Morgan & Smith 1969).
An illustration of the latter is the Coleman et a1 (1972a, b) study of the early
occupational careers of white and black males.

Analytical Studies of Social Change and Social Reporting

The increasing availability of over-time data sets in the form of replications
of baseline studies, panels, event-histories, and time series has allowed
sociologists and other social scientists to tease out plausible, informed expla-
nations of contemporary social trends. Some of these are closely associated
with the social indicators rubric, as when they appear in collections of
 SOCIAL INDICATORS 13

essays that comment on government compendia of statistical series (see

Taeuber 1978, 1981) or when they are members of the new "Social Trends
in the United States" monograph series sponsored by the Social Science
Research Council (see Cherlin 1981). Most, however, are published in
refereed journals or in other research reports and are viewed by their
authors as contributions to basic knowlege rather than to social reporting.
Because the latter body of literature is both large and diverse, review of a
few examples--chosen to illustrate a broader range of issues, data sets, and
modes of analysis-will have to suffice. I introduce these as answers to
rhetorical questions.
After a decade of civil rights activism and legislative gains in the 1960s,
did the relative income gap between blacks and whites widen or narrow in
the 1970s? Using Public Use Sample data from the 1970 Census of Popula-
tion and the March 1976 Annual Demographic File of the Current Popula-
tion Survey, Bianchi (1980) found that the ratio of black-to-white average
household income (in 1975 dollars) was .63 in 1970 and .64 in 1976. From
this one might infer that there was little or no progress towards income
equality between the races in the period 1970-75. However, by decompos-
ing the data by type of household Bianchi found that this ratio grew from
.70 to .75 for husband-wife households and from .72 to .79 for female-
headed households. Thus there was substantial movement towards racial
equality in income for these household types.
How can these findings be reconciled? Using demographic decomposition
techniques, Bianchi (1980) combined two facts into an explanation. First,
both in 1970 and 1976, the average household income for female-headed
households was substantially less than that of husband-wife households.
Second, the proportion of black households headed by women increased
faster from 1970 to 1976 than did that proportion of white households. Thus
even though the trend was towards greater racial income equality within
each household type, the greater rate of flow of black households into the
more income-disadvantaged type (during this period) yields little overall
progress. While these findings and their explanation may not lead to specific
operational suggestions for government policies designed to promote in-
come equality between the races, they indicate changes that have occurred
and suggest areas in which to develop general policies that might alter these
trends.
Conceiving of contemporary "political liberalism" as a body of attitudes
that are reformist, democratic (participatory), supportive of civil liberties,
regulatory and interventionist, centralist, humanitarian, egalitarian, and
permissive, has the US adult population been moving largely in a liberal
direction over the last four decades? By splicing together and analyzing
trends pertaining to relevant attitudinal items spanning the years 1938-
14 LAND

1978 from the General Social Survey, the American National Election
Studies, and earlier Gallup and Harris polls (see Smith 1980), Smith (1982)
concludes that there has indeed been a general shift toward liberalism
during the post-World War I1 period. A plurality of attitude trends moved
toward liberalism. Smith found evidence that this liberal shift has weak-
ened, but not reversed, during the last decade. Furthermore, the liberal
movement has not been uniform across all subjects-attitudes toward abor-
tion, civil liberties, race relations, and religion have moved most consis-
tently in the liberal direction, while crime/violence and spending/taxation
items have shown more conservative trends.
How can these trends be explained? Smith (1982) concludes that the main
causes of the general trend toward liberalism were (a) modernization (the
twentieth-century shift to a post-industrial economy based on technological
innovation, scientific progress, professionalization, and the efficient orga-
nization of people and knowledge) and (b) America's liberal idealism as-
sisted by the New Deal Realignment and institutional leadership from the
Supreme Court and other organizations. By contrast, he finds that the
conservative shift of public spending priorities in the 1970s can be explained
by ( a )the rising burden of taxation, (b) the weakening of economic growth,
(c) the disillusionment with Great Society promises, and (d) the fact that
spending does not present a clear conflict between liberal ideals and liberal
attitudes. Finally, he attributes the conservative trend in attitudes toward
crime and violence to the upsurge in violent and property crime (during the
1960s and 1970s) and the associated decrease in judicial punishments.
Again, these trends and their explanations are not meant to lead to specific
operational programs. But they are informative and enlightening, and they
lead to expectations about how future economic and social-structural trends
may affect shifts in political attitudes.
Has the US welfare system created a new caste of Americans-perhaps
as much as one tenth of the population-who are almost totally dependent
on the state, with little hope or prospect of breaking free (as claimed by
Anderson 1978: 56)? Administrative records show how much the public
sector spends on welfare programs each year and how many families receive
income from welfare sources. When put into time-series form, the statistics
show substantial growth in the welfare rolls over the past several decades,
with close to one-tenth of the population now receiving benefits in one form
or another. But analyses of data from the Panel Study in Income Dynamics
on the patterns of welfare use during the late 1960s and 1970s show that
while many families received income from welfare sources at least once in
the decade, fewer than one fifth of these recipients (about 4.4% of the US
population) could be characterized as dependent upon this income for
extended periods (G. Duncan et a1 1982). Many families receiving welfare
 SOCIAL INDICATORS 15

benefits were in the early phases of recovery from an economic crisis caused
by death, departure, or disability of a husband, a process that often culmi-
nated in finding full-time employment, remarriage, or both. Furthermore,
most of the children of families aided by the welfare system during this
period did not themselves receive welfare benefits after they left home and
formed their own households. These and many related findings about the
dynamics of poverty, welfare, work hours, and earnings (G. Duncan et a1
1982) provide a rational basis from which to evaluate and suggest changes
in the nation's welfare system.
What is the relationship between fluctuations in economic activity (as
indexed by the unemployment rate) and health (as indexed by cause-specific
mortality rates)? In a report to the Joint Economic Committee of the US
Congress, Brenner (1976) claimed that an increase in the unemployment
rate was associated with subsequent increases in age-, sex-, and race-specific
rates of homicide, suicide, death from cirrhosis of the liver and cardiovascu-
lar disease, and total mortality. Brenner reached these conclusions by re-
gressing annual US time series (dating from the 1930s through the early
1970s) for each mortality index on annual rates of unemployment, inflation,
and real per capita income. Cohen & Felson (1979) pointed out that Bren-
ner's equations were misspecified, an assertion corroborated by autocorrela-
tion and other diagnostic statistics reported by Brenner (1976). That this
may indeed have produced spurious findings is suggested by a subsequent
study of Land & McMillen (1980). Using a more elaborate dynamic struc-
tural equation modeling strategy for post-World War I1 US time series,
these authors confirmed Brenner's findings only for the cardiovascular
disease mortality rate. Furthermore, they found that the positive effect of
the unemployment rate on this mortality rate became statistically insignifi-
cant when cigarette consumption-which tends to rise during a recession
-is controlled. In a similar time series study of data on Canada and its
provinces, Adams (1980) corroborated the Land-McMillen findings. The
implications of the latter studies for general policies by which to soften the
impacts of economic downturns on increases in mortality are quite different
from those of Brenner's (1976) study.
Formal Models of Social Change
In response to the analytical problems and opportunities associated with the
development of new and expanded data series, sociologists and statisticians
have developed new analytical models by which to distill information about
social change from the data. For instance, by conjoining the development
of log-linear models for the analysis of discrete survey data in the early
1970s (see e.g. Goodman 1972a, b) with the replications of baseline surveys
launched during that period, Davis (1975) and 0. D. Duncan (1975b)
16 LAND

developed discrete multivariate models for the analysis of survey replica-

tions. Regression and path-analytic approaches to replication analysis were
described by Treiman & Terrell(1975), Winsborough (1975), and Feather-
man & Hauser (1975).
When several replications of cross-sectional surveys are available from
successive periods and spanning a broad range of ages in each survey, a new
analytic problem occurs in both the regression and the log-linear ap-
proaches to the analysis of change. This is the problem of identifying and
allocating components of the total observed changes in a dependent variable
uniquely to the effects of the various age groups, periods, and cohorts
(defined by period of birth or some other common event)-the so-called
age-period-cohort (apc) problem. Because the age of an individual at some
period (date) is exactly equal to that date minus h e r h i s birth cohort date,
solutions to this problem generally require the introduction of a priori
constraints and/or external information of some other kind. Definitive
statements of these modeling issues were given by Mason et a1 (1973) for
the regression case and by Fienberg & Mason (1978) for the log-linear case.
Substantive applications of apc and related models to US data that are
relevant to social reporting include Winsborough (1975), Fienberg & Mason
(1978), B. Duncan (1979), Pullum (1980), Mason & Smith (1981), and 0.
D. Duncan (1982).
The emergence during the 1970s of panel data suitable for the analysis
of national social trends similarly has stimulated work on formal models.
For instance, Goodman (1973) developed log-linear models for the causal
analysis of categorical panel data, whereas Hannan & Young (1977) sur-
veyed and assessed the performance of several estimation algorithms for
regression-type causal models in a panel context. Both of these approaches
model changes in the state-distributions of panel members at successive
waves of a panel. By contrast, Singer & Spilerman (1974; 1976 a,b), building
on a tradition of sociological analysis that dates back to Coleman (1964,
1968), explored a number of statistical issues in the estimation of continu-
ous-time Markov models of mobility between successive panel waves; see
also Cohen & Singer (1979); Singer & Cohen (1980), and Singer (1981). This
research has revealed two difficulties-called the embedability and identi-
fication problems-in fitting stochastic process models to panel data. To
circumvent these problems, Tuma et a1 (1979) advocated the use of event-
history data and developed estimation methods for the causal analysis of
such data via Markov mobility models.
The foregoing stochastic models make efficient use of individual-level
longitudinal data to analyze mobility trajectories. However, many descrip-
tive social-indicators data are available only in the form of time series of
population stocks (e.g. the proportion of individuals between the ages of 20
 SOCIAL INDICATORS 17

and 24 who are in the labor force) and flows (e.g. the number of deaths per
calendar year of males aged 55-59). A major research question to be asked
of such data is how the stocks and flows are influenced by other social,
demographic, and economic changes. Until recently, however, the analysis
of such data typically employed ad hoc combinations of econometric and
time-series techniques that ignore the underlying population-dynamics/so-
cia1 mobility structure of social-indicator time series. In response to this,
Land (1979) developed an ergodic model of aggregate social change that
generalizes the classical life table and stable population models of popula-
tion dynamics. When there are no environmental changes inducing period-
to-period shifts in mobility patterns, when mortality is ignored, and when
there is no age differentiation in transition rates, this model reduces to the
standard Markov social mobility model. This ergodic model has been used
to guide the analysis of social trends in such diverse aspects of American
society as marriage, family, and population (Land & Felson 1977), school-
ing (Felson & land 1978), mortality, morbidity and disability (Land &
McMillen 1980, 1981b), and crime (Cohen et a1 1980).

SOME CURRENT RESEARCH PROBLEMS

Social Accounting Systems
Contemporary American society produces vast quantities of statistical in-
formation about its citizens, institutions, and activities. Accounting systems
attempt to organize such information so as to analyze social constancy and
change. National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA), for example,
organize monetary information on market transactions within a framework
suitable for analyzing the operation of the national economic system. From
the outset of the social-indicators movement, social scientists and statisti-
cians have recognized the inadequacies of the NIPA for assessing broad
societal outcomes, for identifying social problems, for measuring social
change, and for assessing policies and developing plans and programs for
the future. Beginning with conceptual essays by Gross (1966, 1969), this
recognition has stimulated work on the development of generalized social
accounting systems that incorporate information on social conditions not
indexed in the NIPA. In the years since the publication of Gross's essays,
three types of accounting units have provided the foundation for improved
or new approaches to social accounting that seem amenable to application
in social-indicators research.
In net national welfare accounting, based on a monetary accounting unit,
various imputations and other devices are used to take the externalities of
market transactions out of the calculation of national income in the NIPA.
This procedure attempts to obtain a better estimate of the implications for
18 LAND

human welfare of the actions of the market economy. (Externalities are the
costs and benefits of individual and corporate economic activities that are
experienced by the larger society, such as the health costs of air pollution,
that do not enter into decisions by the individuals or organizations under-
taking the activities.) For instance, Nordhaus & Tobin (1973) have incorpo-
rated into the GNP such things as the benefit of leisure and the costs
ofpollution. While this is a useful contribution towards making the NIPA
more adequate aggregate measures of economic welfare, there are limits to
what the national accounts can include by means of such corrections.
A second approach is time-based accounting. Most proposed systems
seek a comprehensive account of the use of time by all individuals in both
market and nonmarket production and consumption (Land & Juster 1981:
5-7). These resource-accounting systems, as indicated above, rest on
household production and consumption theory. By developing imputed
dollar-equivalents of nonmarket household production and consumption
activities, these systems propose to expand the NIPA to incorporate mone-
tary indexes of both market and nonmarket production of economic wel-
fare.
This approach can provide valuable information about the limitations of
inferences based on the conventional NIPA. For instance, time spent at
work is apparently measured badly by conventional data on hours worked.
Comparisons of conventional measures of weekly hours with time-budget
diary estimates indicate that the conventional measure more severely over-
estimated time actually spent at the work place in the mid-1970s than in
the mid-1960s (Land & Juster 1981: 11). These differences may explain
about 1% per year of the widely noted productivity slowdown during this
period.
Nonetheless, there are both practical and conceptual problems with this
approach to social accounting. The practical problems pertain to its extrav-
agant data demands: Some variants (e.g. Fox & Ghosh 1981) seem to
require sample sizes on the order of 100,000 persons per year in order to
achieve the statistical reliability and detail necessary for operationalization.
Conceptually, the household production and consumption theory embodied
in these systems recognizes causation only at the level of individuals or
households. But many social phenomena are subject to "compositional
effects" that emerge as populations of individuals and organizations in-
teract. This means that adequate causal explanations of aggregate social
conditions cannot be extrapolated from causal explanations developed at
the level of individuals or households and vice versa (Firebaugh 1978).
Demographic accounting, in which the accounting unit is the number of
persons or organizations occupying social states or categories at a given
time, is a third approach to social accounting. Developed initially by Stone
 SOCIAL INDICATORS 19

(1971) and subsequently related to the population-dynamics and social-

mobility models of demography and sociology by Land (1979), the empha-
sis in this type of accounting system is on the specification of various
sequences of "state-occupancy distributions" through which a population
of individuals or organizations flows in time, and on the estimation of the
corresponding "transition regimes" that govern transition from one distri-
bution to another. When such accounts are formulated from a "cohort"
rather than a "period" perspective, they can be linked with time-based
social accounts through life-cycle notions. Furthermore, Land (1979) has
shown how the statistical measures by which descriptive social indicators
usually are constructed (described above) can be embedded in a suitably
formulated system of demographic accounts.
Demographic accounting rests upon double-entry accounting notions
requiring that the flows of population into a given geographical area and
period (births, immigrants, and survivors from the preceding period) must
exactly equal the flows from that area and period (deaths, emigrants, and
survivors into the next period). This requirement can be used to evaluate
the internal and temporal consistency of data from diverse census vital
statistics and sample-survey sources. Using such concepts, for instance,
Land & McMillen (1981a) concluded that published annual population
estimates for the United States were temporally inconsistent. They began
to reformulate these into a consistent set of single-year-of-age-, sex-, and
race-specific estimates that can be used as denominators for rates and other
social indicators.
Demographic accounts allow the use of a variety of theoretical frame-
works. For instance, in his efforts to link the NIPA to demographic ac-
counts, Stone (1981) uses conventional input-output notions. But
sociological notions of institutional interdependence and population
ecology theory may also be applied in a demographic-accounting frame-
work (Land & McMillen 1981a). Furthermore, demographic accounts can
be used to operationalize the models of social mobility and population
dynamics described in the preceding section (Land & Rogers 1982). In brief,
demographic accounts seem capable of accommodating the heterogeneity
of the "social" in social indicators and are thus most deserving of additional
research efforts.

Conceptualization and Measurement Issues

Five criticisms of traditional economic indicators that grew out of the early
programmatic discussions of social indicators were cited earlier in this
chapter. Research during the past two decades has been differentially suc-
cessful in redressing the inadequacies indicated. For instance, methodologi-
cal work on satisfaction indicators has obviated the equation of GNP
20 LAND

measures with psychological satisfaction, happiness, or life fulfillment; sur-

vey research instruments now exist for the direct measurement of the latter
concepts. Similarly, net national welfare accounting research has produced
adjustments to the NIPA for market externalities so that they better indi-
cate the contributions of market goods and services to social well-being.
Finally, research on descriptive social indicators has produced new ways of
conceptualizing, measuring, analyzing, and reporting nonmarket social
conditions and changes therein.
In spite of these advances, little progress has been made on the conceptu-
alization and measurement of (a) the social rules, values, norms, and struc-
tures that support the economic system and ( 6 ) the interdependence of
changes in the former and changes in the latter. One approach to this
problem attempts the direct measurement of values and value systems; some
theoretical and methodological work has been done (e.g. Rokeach 1973,
1979), and some empirical evidence on shifts in values from the mid-1950s
to 1971 is reported in the Duncan, Schuman & Duncan (1973) Detroit Area
Survey replication. But efforts to collect data on the values and value
systems of the American population are dwarfed by those devoted to the
study of life satisfaction and attitudes more generally. Thus the data do not
now exist to support studies of shifting value systems that would be compa-
rable to, say, Smith's (1982) research on general liberalism. In fact, social
scientists now know little more about the interdependencies of economic,
social, and demographic changes with changes in value systems in contem-
porary American society than was known at the outset of the social-indica-
tors movement.
An alternative approach is to focus on the organizations and structures
that mediate between individuals and the nation-state. Social processes
involve many layers of such intermediate structures: ties of mutual support
among friends and within families; flows of information through kin, friend-
ship, and collegial networks; linkages of schooling organizations to homes,
offices, and factories; the control of human services by local governments,
etc. Sociologists have produced many studies of intermediate social struc-
tures and processes, but little progress has been made towards conceptualiz-
ing and measuring their significant changes. Several theories in
organizational sociology merit exploration for potential applicability to this
task. Two illustrations must suffice.
Blau's (1977) theory concerns how variations in the inequality and
heterogeneity of social structures (conceived of as multi-dimensional spaces
of social positions among which a population is distributed) affect processes
of social association (communications among individuals). Rogers (1971)
has documented how social heterogeneity slows the diffusion of new ideas.
Noting this, Lewis (1982) has argued that the weakening of technology-
 SOCIAL INDICATORS 21

based economic growth in the United States during the past two decades
may be related to increasing social heterogeneity. Taken together, these
studies suggest a need for systematic research on the dimensions along
which social heterogeneity in American society has increased or decreased,
on how these changes have affected processes of social association, and on
how this relates to changes in the productivity of the American economy.
White's (1981 a,b,c) theory concerns how organizations produce inter-
faces: contracts, markets, employee-employer relationships, negotiations,
understandings, lawsuits, etc. Lewis (1982) has argued that increases in a
certain class of "interfaces"-namely litigations-may have contributed to
the US productivity slowdown. Such relationships and, more generally, the
causes and consequences of changes in attributes of interfaces should be
studied systematically.
Social Forecasting
The systematic use of social indicators to forecast trends in social conditions
and/or turning points in trends has so far not rewarded earlier hopes. To
be sure, descriptive social indicators, especially those in traditional demo-
graphic areas, continue to be used in conventional projection exercises
(Ascher, 1978: Ch. 3); and a large futurology literature makes various uses
of social indicators in the preparation of projections and scenarios (e.g.
Snyder 1973). But there has been virtually no systematic use of the results
of analytical studies of social change and formal models to generate out-of-
sample-period (ex ante) forecasts of social conditions (an exception is Co-
hen et al 1980).
As a consequence, this topic greatly needs research attention, both to
produce improved forecasts and to contribute to the theory and methodol-
ogy of forecasting. Surely the application of results from analytical and
forecasting studies can lead to more abundant and higher quality short-
range (0-2 yr) and medium-range (2-10 yr) social forecasts, even though
longer-range forecasts will probably remain speculative at best. In the latter
case, systematic study might lead to the development of "impossibility
theorems" that define the accuracy limits of social forecasts.

CONCLUSION
Contemporary interest in social indicators has been sustained among social
scientists for nearly two decades. Much of the first decade was devoted to
the production of programmatic statements and the sorting out of promis-
ing research directions. The second decade saw the production of (a) repli-
cation studies, new longitudinal data sets, and time series, which stimulated
(b) numerous analytical studies of social change, social reports, and work
on formal models of social change.
22 LAND

The results of this activity should not be underestimated. Substantively,

much more is known about social conditions and changes in American
society today than when the study that led to the Bauer (1966) volume was
commissioned. Perhaps even more importantly, two principles for the con-
duct of research on social indicators have been established. First, without
careful replications of baseline studies and/or regularly repeated observa-
tions, measurement and analysis of social change can be neither scientific
nor relevant to policy. Second, economies of scale and scientific comparabil-
ity are facilitated by the creation of common data bases.
Because social-indicators research depends more than most social science
research on cooperation between the federal government and the academic
research community, there are, and probably always will be, challenges to
the continued scientific development of the field. For one thing, the produc-
tion of the major national data sets by the federal statistical system-from
which social indicators are derived-is only partly under the control of
social scientists. Furthermore, the allocation of public funds to produce
these and private sector data sets (such as the National Election Studies and
the General Social Survey) is subject to larger political forces. Thus federal
budget cuts may remove much of the statistical infrastructure upon which
social-indicators research rests.
This possibility might evoke the cynical judgment that the study of social
indicators, born in the American society of the 1960s, is not needed in the
1980s and beyond. An alternative view, based on a sociological assessment
of the critical importance of information for both public and private sector
decisions, is that needs for statistical data on social conditions and trends
will not disappear. Of course, there are new issues of public concern in the
1980s, and some issues of critical importance in earlier periods are less
salient today, as Sheldon & Freeman (1970) anticipated. But the need for
information about current conditions and trends remains.
The discipline of sociology should note the powerful influence sociolo-
gists have had on the development of the field of social indicators. The
descriptive social indicators perspective-emphasizing the production of
data, analyses, and models by which to improve social reporting-has been
one of the most successful lines of development pursued over the past two
decades. This approach has stimulated accumulation of much new, socially
and scientifically useful knowledge, only a small sampling of which was
reviewed here. Yet, as a profession, sociology has been neither notably
cognizant of, nor committed to, the development of social indicators and
social reporting. New organizational arrangements may, therefore, be re-
quired in the future. Only the continued commitment of sociologists to the
study of social indicators will ensure that the achievements of the past are
consolidated and built upon.
 SOCIAL INDICATORS 23

Preparation of this paper was made possible, in part, by National Science

Foundation Grant SES-8104767. The writing of this chapter also was facili-
tated by interaction, over several years of service, with members of the
Social Science Research Council Advisory and Planning Committee on
Social Indicators and with members of the staff of the Council's Center for
Coordination of Research on Social Indicators. In particular, I thank Otis
Dudley Duncan, Bill Mason, John Modell, Robert Parke, Robert Pearson,
Albert J. Reiss, Stephen H. Schneider, and Nancy Brandon Tuma for
comments that improved the manuscript.
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