| Abstrakt: |
This article examines some aspects of federal regulation and applied social research done under contract with United States government agencies. Contract work, commissioned by government offices, probably represents the most regulated and scrutinized social research being done in the country today. One such contract work was a large social experiment in housing by Abt Associates Inc. This experiment, called Administrative Agency Experiment, was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It sought to learn how a cash assistance program could be administered effectively. The General Accounting Office (GAO), which monitors the expenditures of public funds for the U.S. Congress, was an actor as well. There was a set of policy issues that the research was to answer. To do this, the research design called for on-site observers to fill out function logs, which were really field reports that divided administrative behavior into many different categories. The issue at stake was whether data on individual low-income households, which had been collected by researchers who gave written promises of confidentiality, should be released to the GAO for an audit. After a long debate, over 75 percent of households in the audit sample agreed to be audited by the GAO. |
