SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
VOLUME 26 . NUMBER 3 . SEPTEMBER 1972 230 PARK AVENUE路 NEW YORK, N.Y. 10017
NEW SSRC CENTER FOR COORDINATION OF RESEARCH ON SOCIAL INDICATORS OPENS IN WASHINGTON A NEW Social Science Research Council program in the field of social indicators is to be inaugurated with the opening in Washington, D.C. on September 15, 1972 of the Center for Coordination of Research on Social Indicators. The Center's purpose is to contribute to the development of a broad range of indicators of social change, in response to demands from both social science and policy communities over the past decade. Its role is to help organize the process by which this objective may be achieved. The Center will seek to stimulate, facilitate, and guide research on social indicators by providing a locus and source of information on research under way, and by encouraging communication among and between researchers and the broad constituency that has need for their output. The task is to encourage the application of the best social science methods to the problems of social indicators and to bring developments of potential significance to the attention of policy planners who can make use of them and statistical agencies that could assume responsibility for their regular production and analysis. The staff of the Center will be directed by Robert Parke, Jr. and will be responsible to an SSRC Advisory and Planning Committee on Social Indicators. Otis Dudley Duncan will serve as chairman of the committee; other members will be announced. The Center is funded by a grant to the Council from the National Science Foundation. A Washington location was selected by President Eleanor Sheldon in order to facilitate communication between the Center and the federal statistical and other agencies that form a considerable part of the constitu-
ency for social indicators, and agencies that support research in the social indicators field. In the Center's first year the staff will establish personal contacts with individual scholars, groups, and institutes that are conducting research related to social indicators. These contacts, national and international, are expected to provide the basis for continuing cooperation and communication, the procurement of relevant documents, and the interchange of proposals, plans, and thoughts about future activities. Published and unpublished documents describing past research and present projects will be assembled and catalogued; a periodic newsletter will be issued on current and prospective research. Concurrently, committee members, staff, and outside consultants will plan and conduct conferences on future research developments. Mr. Parke, the Center's Director, is a social statistician and demographer. He was Deputy Director of the National Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, which last spring completed a twoyear program of research and recommendations and issued its final report to President Nixon and the Congress. The Commission's report, Population and the American Future} has received wide acclaim as a comprehensive and well-written social science analysis of the implications of population change in the United States. Prior to his work for the Population Commission, Mr. Parke was a statistician in the Bureau of the Census. He served for ten years in the Bureau's Population Division, where he was responsible for the statistical program on marriage and the family and related topics, and subsequently served as a Bureau Program Planning
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