ABSTRACT
The research design meets most of the logical requirements of an objective evaluation—contriving measures of each programme's intermediate effectiveness, its relevance to the ultimate purpose, and the extent to which concerted programmes reinforce each other. The logical rigour of the research also depends upon a rather narrow definition of the project's aims. The conception of the Boston project required that its research and operational divisions concert their aims in a manner which not only saddled its actions with an impracticable rigidity of purpose, but committed the research programme to an experimental sequence that was far too long. The Boston proposal represents the most thorough and uncompromising attempt to submit an experiment in social reform to the discipline of controlled measurement. The integration of research and action brought a rare objectivity to social reform, and this in itself was perhaps the most radical and productive of all the project's innovations.
