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Abstract
What are the “returns” to policy-oriented research in the social sciences? One presumes
that the positive net benefits to society, or at least a certain segment of society, would be
treated as returns, but how does one determine what these benefits are? Clearly benefits
to some social science research are available because society continued to fund it, albeit
at different levels in different locations and times. This paper cannot fully answer the
questions of what it is we seek to measure in any empirical sense, although it will discuss
this issue. The returns in the marketplace for social science research are those that exist
in the eye of the customer who bears the cost of the research. This paper's primary goal is
to offer the client some ways of measuring these returns. It does this with particular
emphasis on methods that are often overlooked, even though some of them have been
available to the analyst for decades. It also explains some of the costs and benefits of
each method and explains how some of them may be used together in order to achieve a
higher level of efficacy in measurement.