ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the use of social indicators in the policy process, first in Western industrialized countries, and then for development planning for the Third World. It reviews some of the political, bureaucratic and methodological difficulties associated with the use of social indicators in policy-making. Social indicators may be measures of input, throughput or output. Input measures are the resources available to some process affecting well-being in the social environment, for example, number of doctors per unit of population. An excellent example of the interweaving of subjective and objective indicators is Social and Community Planning Research’s British Social Attitudes: The 1985 Report, which sets out to explore, not a unitary public opinion, but ‘several publics and many opinions’. Activity in the subjective indicator field has its roots in the work of both Hadley Cantril and Abraham Maslow in the 1950s and early 1960s.
