The development of social indicators from content analysis of social documents

If we agree that social indicators indicate or measure only within the context of a theory of social change, and if we further assume that theories of social change which deal only with social conditions, behavioral interchanges or transactions, and the material environment, are likely to be unsuccessful because they ignore the mental side of life, it follows that we will want our theories of social change, and the social indicators associated with them, to incorporate the cultural and group psychological aspects of social behavior.When we look to possible data bases in search of raw material for social indicators of culture and group psychology there are, broadly speaking, two possibilities. Data may be gathered from interviews or from cultural artifacts.But interview response data, because of (a) their reactive character; (b) the difficulty of compiling time-series of responses; (c) the impossibility of making use of historical sources and (d) difficulties of validation against indicators external to the survey research context are, perhaps, less than ideal as a possible basis for social indicator systems. This leaves us with the possibility, and with the problem, of developing group psychological and cultural indicators from an analysis of cultural artifacts: literary documents, films, political speeches and other sources of this sort.