ABSTRACT
Socioeconomic impact assessments have played an increasingly important role in the environmental assessment process requiring substantial investments by public and private concerns. This chapter reports the results of an analysis of the socioeconomic components of a sample of environmental impact statements. The analysis reported consists of a systematic review of a sample of socioeconomic impact statements. The initial intent was to select a relatively large number of EISs, to extract key economic and demographic projections from these for 1980 and then to evaluate the accuracy of these projections against the economic and demographic data provided by the 1980 Census of Population and Housing. The content analysis of the impact statements revealed several major characteristics of socioeconomic impact assessments and of impact statements in general that merit discussion. Among the most evident of these characteristics was a lack of concern for the inclusion of data items absolutely essential to the socioeconomic assessment process.
