ABSTRACT
Social impact assessment is practical project-oriented social forecasting. Future studies are also social forecasting but involve attempts to generate possible alternative visions, or scenarios, of the future of societal systems and subsystems by making use of a variety of quantitative and qualitative techniques. Technology assessement (TA) falls roughly between the two insofar as TA is generally concerned with the indirect or unintended effects on society resulting from the introduction of new technology. Three types of social forecasting techniques can be identified: trend extrapolative, qualitative, and dynamic modeling. Trend extrapolative research is social forecasting that is always quantitative and projects patterns and changes in patterns based on historical time-series data. Qualitative research relies on human judgment and usually manipulates qualitative information in a quantitative fashion. The dynamic modeling approach is also quantitative and expresses mathematically relationships between variables in a specified system.
