A Biography of Kenneth C. Land: Pioneer in Quality of Life and Social Indicators Research

Abstract

Kenneth C. Land was born in the small town of Llano, Texas (population 3,000) on August 19, 1942. He earned Bachelor of Arts degrees in Sociology and History at Texas Lutheran College in 1964, a Master of Arts degree in Sociology, minoring in Mathematics, from the University of Texas-Austin in 1966, and a Ph. D. in Sociology, minoring in Mathematics, from the University of Texas-Austin in 1969. He was a Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in Mathematical Statistics at Columbia University from 1969–1970. And later Ken was successively a member of the faculties of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the University of Texas at Austin before joining the Duke Sociology Department as Chairman, which he served from January 1986 to August 1997. Ken was named the John Franklin Crowell Professor of Sociology and Demography at Duke University in 1990. Ken’s contributions to social indicators/quality-of-life/well-being studies commenced during his Social Science Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship year at Columbia University. Dr. Eleanor Sheldon of the Russell Sage Foundation had initiated the Indicators of Social Change research project at the Foundation. She interviewed Ken and signed him up to work on the project on a part-time basis during the PostDoctoral year and then as a Staff Member of the Foundation for 3 years after that. The first product of Ken’s work at Russell Sage was the article “On the Definition of Social Indicators (1971).” In this article Ken, outlined the characteristics of social indicators, and specified that “... the criterion for classifying a social statistic as a social indicator is its informative value which derives from its empirically verified nexus in a conceptualization of a social process” (p. 323, emphasis in original). Pursuing this line of thought, in the 1970s and 1980s Ken organized a number of conferences and workshops to focus on the use of social indicators, and each resulted in an edited volume of the work presented. He and sociologist Seymour Spilerman coordinated a Russell Sage Foundation-sponsored Conference on Social Indicators Models, to explore models that could be used to form indicators of the functioning of social systems and analyze their interconnections and changes over time. As a member Applied Research Quality Life (2014) 9:1111–1114 DOI 10.1007/s11482-014-9337-z