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There certainly is a crying need for cost studies. When a private agency, who, by the way, is affiliated with the Child Welfare League of America, has with a complement of three presumably professional workers a combined average case load of 46 for a year's period, then we indeed can understand the outsider's repeated question, "What price social work?"

It hardly need be stressed, though, that we must not view cost studies too narrowly merely as an accounting of time spent and value received. We cannot be satisfied to learn that a particular agency is keeping all its workers fully occupied doing an adequate job with the type of case the agency has customarily handled. To me, it is extremely significant that in my state a small agency which has always excelled in the quality of service it gives to the community is, nevertheless, the one which has asked loudest and most persistently "Are we doing the most we can do for our community with the means at our command?" Their board members are not merely satisfied in doing a good job with the needs they recognized in yesteryears; they are keenly aware that the endowments they hold are a public trust which puts them under obligation to offer their uttermost to meet the needs of today, and to this end they are willing to adjust their program to changing times.

What would happen if such soul-searching scrutinizing would be undertaken by child welfare agencies across the country? How many buildings dedicated to the memory of worthy citizens, long since dead, would have to be vacated? How many deserving staff members with long and faithful service would have to be faced with the reality that they no longer possess adequate skills to deal with the problems of the day? How many agencies would have to accept the grim knowledge that they are representing themselves in their community as giving service which a staff three times the size that they now possess would no longer be able to fulfill adequately.

When we next consider projects in measuring the effectiveness of specific techniques we face a situation which is very similar to the difficulty in measuring needs or services: once again the practitioners in our child welfare agencies are not agreeing on the definitions of their various techniques; and, so, each project forms an isolated unity often clearly understandable only to one who is thoroughly acquainted with that particular agency's policies and practices. Furthermore, to study results in social adjustments, one most of necessity undertake long-range research projects, long-range at least in terms of follow-up, not just one or two years after the case was closed by the agency but five, ten years and more.

Perhaps the answer to many of these implied and direct questions I have raised in this paper are found if we could comply with Dr. Klein's demands for studies in the methodology of research.

How can we adequately measure service to unmarried mothers and their children? How do we determine success and failure in an institutional program which so definitely involves the child's physical, intellectual, social and emotional growth. What criteria have we developed to compare one group of children with those of another agency, if we wish to review their respective progress?

It seems to me that I should call to your attention here two notable ventures which both seem to have taken a courageous and rather effective step forward towards clarification of these problems, no matter how limited their application may be at the moment. The one is the plan for definite treatment categories first developed at the New York State Training School for Boys at Warwick and amply reported in professional literature by H. D. Williams and by R. L. Jenkins. The other is the work at the Michigan Child Guidance Institute (and later continued in Illinois) aimed at the development (through statistical analysis of case records) of "Fundamental Patterns of Maladjustment" and the dynamics of their origin. It is significant that this research by R. L. Jenkins and Lostor Hewitt, termed by non less than the late James S. Plant, "a careful conservative piece of work of inestimable value" has not been followed up by similar studies in related areas. Might this be explained by the very fact that its value lies in a unique combination of psychiatric considerations and statistical computations?

The mere mention of such very considerable research undertakings inevitably raises the question: "How can we facilitate such research in our child welfare agencies?" If we agree that social agencies must move from the ivory tower of contemplative complacency to the firing line of effective productivity then it becomes obvious that the smallest, most specialized agencies must be as much committed to do their share in research activities as the large-scale public agency serving a mass clientele with a minimum budget, a Council of Social Agencies, or indeed a school of social work.