ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some uses of data periodically produced for other than scholarly purposes, but which can be exploited by social scientists. More than other scholars, archaeologists, anthropologists and historians have wrestled with the problems of archival data. The data are the actuarial records, the votes, the city budgets and the communications media which are periodically produced and paid for by someone other than the researcher. The chapter draws from continuous records which typically extend over long periods of time and all the extraneous events of history are at work to threaten valid research comparisons, there is a great need for transformation. One of the major gains of the running record, then, is the capability to study a hypothesis as external conditions vary over time. The running archival records offer a large mass of pertinent data for many substantive areas of research.
