Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

The organization and financing of research 701
fact that America now stands at the threshold of what Daniel Bell (1964,
1967), 129,130 following Reisman (1958),’7~ has called the ‘post-industrial society’.
American experience suggests that the advent of post-industrialism wil increase
the degree to which problems concerning ‘quality of life’ - in all its
aspects - must be confronted. I3I
7. One indication of the implications for the social sciences is the large sum
being spent on ‘general purpose scientific data collection’ for economic and
social phenomena, even though that for natural phenomena remains much
larger. Since 1962 NSF has separated Federal obligations in these two respects.
Some 30% of total funds (increased from $220 million in 1962 to $381 million
in 1967) have been expended on the collection of economic and social data.25
This is IO times greater than the social science share in overall R & D. For 1967
the social science share of expenditure on general purpose data collection
stood at $103 million - equal to more than a quarter of its allocation under the
R & D heading. Though only some of these data were generated primarily for
research purposes the figures underline the importance for the utilization of the
social sciences of what in France is referred to as ‘information de As
far as possible such data need to be collected so that they can be used for
research purposes.4 Substantial progress has been made in this regard in the
us over a wide range of Federal statistical programmes.*
8. All this and the ferment over social accounting,23 which is related, can only
be understood against the background of developments in the field of computer
archiving of social science data. This movement got under way in the mid-50s
and led in the first round to the establishment of repositories for the raw data
from commercial polls and academic sample surveys. The most important of
these organizations grew out of the Survey Research Center at the University
of Michigan. This was the Inter-University Consortium, an organization currently
financed by contributions from some 120 universities and by grants from the
National Science Foundation. This organization not only places survey data
at the disposal of graduate students and research workers but has also taken
steps to organize a large archive of historical statistics for computer retrieval and
analysis. During the rg60s, economists took similar steps to secure computer
access to the vast masses of federal statistics. They launched plans for a Federal
Data Center but ran into political difficulties over the privacy of individual
records.** The invasion of the privacy of the individual and the threat to his
liberty if the comprehensive centralized data banks are established which the
computer now makes possible have raised great fears. Yet the benefits which
could follow from the analysis of such data are immense. Finding a solution to
this issue is likely to become a central issue of social science p01icy.~3,~~
* Vide: The Behavioral Sciences and the Federal Government, pp. 23-31.’
** For similar developments at the international level, see the chapter by S. Rokkan
above and such collections as R. C. MERRITT and S. ROKKAN (eds.), Comparing Nutions.’gO