Exhibit 1209 ยท Journal article
Assessing the impact of planned social change
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
Campbell states two "pessimistic laws" about quantitative social indicators used in decisions. Illustrates with crime statistics, police complaint recording and achievement-test scores, and says the evidence is "predominantly anecdotal".
- Source
- Donald T. Campbell, Evaluation and Program Planning 2(1): 67-90 (1979); text read from the 1976 Occasional Paper No. 8 reprint
- Date
- 1979
- Quoted from
- Section "Corrupting Effect of Quantitative Indicators", p. 34 of the Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation reprint PDF
- Grade
- Peer-reviewed
- Document
- https://jmde.journals.publicknowledgeproject.org/index.php/jmde_1/article/view/297
- Accessed
- 2026-11-10
- Cited by
- Findings citing this exhibit
- Note
- Read in the open JMDE reprint (originally Paper #8, Occasional Paper Series, Dec. 1976, Dartmouth Public Affairs Center). The 1979 Elsevier version is paywalled and was not read; confirm its page (commonly cited at p. 85) before citing it.