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It should be clear that responsibility to initiate and sponsor research in child welfare agencies, public or private, must rest with governing boards and hence it is particularly appropriate here to repeat what a board member had to say on this subject at a Child Welfare League meeting during last year's conference in Atlantic City. In an address "A Board Member Speaks on Our Responsibility for Research" Mr. James Brown commented: "There are a few children's agencies which have made a beginning in research, but most of us have resorted to research only in emergencies. We wait until we get seriously snarled up or become uncomfortable under criticism from the community, and then cry loudly for our good friends at the Child Welfare League or our local Council of Social Agencies to come to our immediate rescue with a 'study'...

"I do not believe that research can any longer be considered a luxury, and I am sure that if we are going to discharge our trusteeship effectively, we must begin to give a more important place to it right now."

For the very reason that it has become so common these days to heap abuse on governmental agencies and their supposed inefficiency, it should be stressed here that altogether the public welfare agencies have shown a greater willingness to show in facts and figures what they are doing and where they plan on going and not a few have ventured beyond into the realm of analytical research.

No agency, public or private, has equalled the distinguished record of the United States Children's Bureau, whose untold number of studies have given it world-wide leadership in the field of child care and protection.

A first obligation of any board then is to make available for research purposes an amount of money which is commensurate with the size of the agency's operation, regardless whether this involves tax money, community chest support or endowment. Next the board will have to make sure that they have on the staff workers who have the skill and the time required for research work, and an executive who has at least the ability to recognize the agency's tasks in research and the willingness to facilitate them.

A further obligation incumbent on the board pertains to the absolute necessity that research activities not be interfered with by dictates of convenience or, worse yet, defensiveness. If the agency cannot afford a qualified research supervisor of its own (and few will be able to do so), then the board must get outside consultation to ascertain that the methods and procedures of the particular project were sound and the conclusions warranted by the findings. To "doctor up" a research report is about as silly and futile as to alter an X-ray report.

Finally, the board, with and through its research workers, must join in cooperative research planning not only with other agencies, but also with representatives from the social and biological sciences.

In view of the dire necessity to make an emphasis on research the order of the day, some boards of smaller agencies who are anyhow faced with readjustment of their functions in the community might consider making research their primary activity, much as we have such centers developed by the medical and psychological professions. In this connection we should take another look at the suggestion of Herta Kraus in her article "The Future of Social Work" (1) that some voluntary agencies consider abandoning their isolated service units in favor of a new partnership with the public agency, which would take the form of a research unit (or other consultant service) within the public agency, but staffed and operated by the voluntary agency. This proposal is surely no panacea but merely one of many ways of combining the efforts of public and private welfare work.

As we come to the close of this short and necessarily sketchy summary a final question presents itself: "How shall the finished research product be utilized?"

Aside from the rather obvious application of the study's conclusions as far as the immediate agency is concerned, effective planning from a broader viewpoint makes it imperative that the research findings as well as conclusions, be shared by others. Once more the problem of semantics arises: The joy of professionalism accentuating petty differences in terminology versus plain, common, but effective English. In order to be available the research project must be suitably multigraphed or printed, and an effort made to let it reach those who would have an obvious professional concern. And finally; it must become known, must be carried in reference lists, and be indexed.

It is for this purpose that there was organized last year in the Children's Bureau the Clearinghouse for Research in Child Life under the directorship of the chairman of today's meeting, Dr. Clara E. Councell. The Clearinghouse proposes to collect from and distribute to research workers information about current studies in the various fields affecting child life.