ABSTRACT
A central issue in many urban planning situations is the estimation and explanation of changes in the characteristics of populations. This chapter continues the investigation of the rationale for this methodological strategy. It draws quite heavily on several earlier papers and, in particular, from a recent discussion of micro-analytic models of occupancy shifts for households in specific classes of dwellings. Several recent papers attempt to demonstrate the impact of the interdependence of philosophical and methodological positions on the design of scientific research. The use of micro-level data in the social sciences has become fairly common in the past decade. At the beginning of a particular line of scientific inquiry, as in the case of research on residential mobility, the issue is not so much one of, a priori, developing the right model. The conclusion thus goes beyond the suggestion that research on residential change should embody the principles discussed.
