Recent widely publicized studies claim facilities for treatment, storage, and disposal of hazard ous wastes (TSDFs) are located in areas with higher than average proportions of minorities, thereby exposing minorities to relatively greater levels of potential risk. These claims have influenced...

This essay contrasts basic and applied social research, noting that the major partion of applied social research is pursued outside academic settings. Several reasons are given for this pattern, including the inability of university researchers to produce research on the scale and under the time...

Policy experiments represent a powerful tool for testing the consequences of contemplated social programs. However, experimentation in the policy field raises perplexing problems and issues, some of which are not commonly encountered in the literature of experimental social science. This paper...

Data are presented on the entitlement status of nearly 30,000 homeless persons who have received care through the national Health Care for the Homeless program in 16 project cities. Overall, about half of all clients are enrolled in at least one benefit program; program participation is slightly...

S-Night in New Orleans was similar to that in other cities. Perhaps because New Orleans is the smallest and most geographically compact of the five cities, the S-Night enumeration was more complete in that more "decoys" were enumerated in New Orleans than in the other cities. Still, even here,...

Shelter and Street Night (S-Night) was the recent effort by the U.S. Bureau of the Census to include selected components of the nation's homeless population in the 1990 decennial count. Teams of investigators in five cities (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and New Orleans) were...

This article reviews the historical linkages between the evolution of the survey research method and applied social research, arguing that most or all of the elements of the modern survey were devoloped in response to immediate, practical (as opposed to academic or disciplinary) concerns. In...

This article evaluates a residential alcohol/drug treatment program for the homeless. The process evaluation documents numerous deviations from the program as designed and other implementation problems. Foremost among these: The project was designed as a randomized experiment, but randomization...