ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on ways in which replicated surveys can be helpful for both descriptive and theoretical social research. It highlights a set of data having to do with subjective mental health and human motives that were obtained in both 1957 and 1976. The chapter discusses the potential to plot 'social indicators' that are highly useful in outlining systematic social history. McClelland analyzes cultural documentations to assess national levels of motives. Cohort analysis in the process of working out social indicators from replicated surveys, the chapter discovers an additional methodological possibility that having only one cross-sectional sample lacks. Beyond the descriptive virtues of replicated surveys lies their potential for generating tests of social scientific explanations for social behaviour. To the extent that social scientists commit themselves to investigating the general conceptual problems of social psychology and formulate proper conceptual schemes to explain the social history being documented, the social policy issues ought to be better understood.
