How do people live in a welfare state? Are they better off now than 30 years ago? If so, is this true in all spheres of life or do some of them reveal regression? What is the health status of the population and how is it changing? Has work become physically less demanding but more tedious? How many people experience multi ple deprivation in terms of income, education, work, housing, and health? Do people become more or less interested and involved in and political affairs? What happens to and family relations in a welfare state? Reliable answers to these questions cannot be found in traditional statistical information about societal development. The gross national product (GNP) has been used as a measure of welfare, but this use has been seriously questioned. Existing statistics do not cover all the important spheres of life, and they often measure welfare inputs rather than outcomes. For example, standard statistics may tell about the number of patients enrolled in hospitals or how many dwell ings have been built during a year, but we also want to know how health and housing conditions have changed. Good data on welfare outcomes exist here and there, but leave much to be desired in terms of comprehensiveness. Yet these are crucial questions for individual citizens, politicians, planners, and scientists. They answer these questions anyway, either on the basis of their own (necessarily limited) experiences, political, social, and economic views and prejudices, or at best on the basis on sound empirical research. How things are and how they have changed can be answered by research; the answers need not be left to the realm of persuasion and political or economic power. This then is the background for an emerging and rapidly enlarging interest in welfare research in the 1960s and 1970s, giving rise to terms like social