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Articles in this special issue discuss the utilization of social research by governmental commissions. How social science knowledge influences their decision making is examined. (RM)

The article deals with the challenges in improving social measurement used in social science research, which may be in terms of social indicators, social class and race and ethnicity. Measurement is defined as the process to which a numerical value is assigned to the level or state of an object. The author discusses in details the complexities of conceptualization, measurement, operationalization and execution in quantitative social research. He focuses on the need for the processes involved in social classification.

This paper discusses the role of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, a foundation set up by John D. Rockefeller Sr. in memory of his wife, which between 1923 and 1928, under its director Beardsley Ruml, distributed twenty million dollars for social science research The Memorial supported major programs of sociological research at the University of Chicago and the University of North Carolina, as well as providing important assistance to individual sociologists (such as Elton Mayo) and to institutions at which sociology was taught (such as the London School of Economics) The Memorial during the 1920s laid the foundations of the pattern of large-scale sociological research in the contemporary American university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ethical and practical merits of disguised, secret, or covert participant observation continue to be debated. This article suggests the need to recognize a wider variety of observational research strategies than are captured by this "either/or" debate. Such strategies include retrospective participant observation, "experience recollected in academic tranquility"; the native as stranger, in which participants observe milieux with which they have long familiarity; adoption of the role of "covert outsider," occupying a nonresearch position in an organization in order to do research; and the "overt insider," deliberately adopting a particular occupational role, and undergoing training in it, to gain research access to otherwise closed research settings. Such alternative possibilities suggest that the need for covert observational strategies may be exaggerated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]