Licensing Measurement

seemed to have more and more impact on children and
their families. This was the beginning of governmental
rule promulgation, and it was an exciting time to be on
the cusp of this new research area.
I learned very quickly that I had to make several
adjustments to the statistical methods I learned in
graduate school to be able to analyze licensing data and
measure regulatory compliance. Several of the theories
and methodologies were controversial when I proposed
them because they went counter to the prevailing
paradigms at that point in the 1960-70's. However, over
time with many replications and validations, the new
conceptual framework was accepted in the licensing and
the regulatory science research literatures.
There are many people to thank over the years and
obviously this has been a group effort in applying
regulatory science to early care and education and then
expanding it to human services and hopefully beyond.
What I have found in my most recent readings is that
regulatory science is being applied in many different
content silos from the FDA, to economics, to banking,
and of course within the human services particularly
adult and child residential services. What appears to be
lacking is a unifying theory that goes across these
disparate content areas. That is why I think the
introduction of the Regulatory Compliance Theory of
Diminishing Returns is such an important contribution
when we think about licensing/regulatory measurement
and monitoring systems. The theory has become the
foundation for the development of the methodologies
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