Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal , volume 20, number 1, March 2002, pages 3 9, Beech Tree Publishing, 10 Watford

Close, Guildford, Surrey GU1 2EP, UK

Social impact assessment

Why is social impact assessment the orphan of
the assessment process?
Rabel J Burdge

Social impact assessment (SIA) has not been

widely adopted as a component of the assessment
process for project or policy appraisal. This paper focuses on four issues: how we are labeling
research on social impacts; what historical
events led to the separation of SIA from the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process;
whether the Guidelines and Principles for Social Impact Assessment helped focus the research and practice of SIA; and whether there is
evidence that we are accumulating a body of
knowledge labeled social impact assessment. To
become institutionalized EIASIA must be a
statutory requirement, otherwise agencies and
consulting firms that do EIA will not include social impacts. The requirement must extend to
international bilateral aid, donor and lending
agencies.

Keywords: social impact assessment; social assessment; public

involvement

Rabel J Burdge is a Professor of Sociology and Environmental

Studies, Western Washington University, Arntzen Hall 510,
Bellingham, WA 98225-9081, USA; Tel: +1 360 650 7521; Email: burdge@cc.wwu.edu. Portions of this paper appeared in
Dale et al (2001, pages 1523) under the title The international
institutionalization of social impact assessment. It is used here
by permission of the author and the editors.

Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal March 2002

OCIAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT (SIA) has

not been widely adopted as a component of the
assessment process for environmental and
natural resource decision-making. 1 The reasons are
many and varied.
First and foremost, there is minimal consensus as
to the definition and even the label for SIA (Barrow, 2000, page 4).
Secondly, there is little agreement on the relationship between SIA and environmental impact
assessment (EIA). Are they related and should
the two processes be done collectively or separately? If SIA is a stand-alone process, what are
the benefits and in what assessment settings is it
performed?
When is social impact assessment required? If it is
not required and does not contribute to the assessment of projects and policies, then why do it?
What were the origins of SIA and why was it seen
as important in the first place?
Is there a body of research findings that might
direct the practitioner in doing a SIA of a proposed action? If a body of research findings exist,
is there a conceptual framework to guide the research and advance the accumulation of findings
about social impacts?
What should be included when doing a SIA?
Do we have examples where a SIA has actually
made a difference or been followed in the project
appraisal/decision process?
Answers to these questions require considerable
space, so in this paper I focus on four issues. How
are we labeling research on social impacts? What

1461-5517/02/010003-7 US$08.00 IAIA 2002

SIA the orphan of the assessment process?

historical events led to the separation of SIA from

the EIA process? Have the Guidelines and Principles for Social Impact Assessment (Interorganizational Committee, 1994) helped focus the research
and practice of SIA. Is there evidence that we are
accumulating a body of knowledge labeled social
impact assessment?

Sociology. Have these publications been cited?

Were there SIA articles published with no journal
citations?
Do any of the articles provide a conceptual
framework around which present and future SIA
research could be organized?
Have the Guidelines and Principles for Social
Impact Assessment (Interorganizational Committee, 1994) been influential in guiding the research
and practice of SIA?

Background and data sources

Data come from a content analysis of all the articles
published in the two main impact assessment refereed journals Environmental Impact Assessment
Review (EIAR) and Impact Assessment and Project
Appraisal (IAPA) (see Table 1). These two scientific
periodicals are both a repository of knowledge and a
history of how impact assessment developed as a
policy- and knowledge-based discipline. The following questions guided my content analysis of the two
journals.

The universe for the content analysis was the 983

articles published from the first issues through August of 2000 (Table 1). Of these, 160 (16%) dealt
with SIA. More SIA papers (100) have appeared in
IAPA than EIAR. Prior to 1980, research and methods papers about EIASIA appeared in such diverse
publications as Water Resources Bulletin, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Journal of
Environmental Management, Natural Resources
Journal, Environment and Behavior, Human Organization, Project Appraisal and the Journal of Environmental and Management Planning in addition
to those previously mentioned. I counted citations
prior to 1980 from refereed journals only. No
attempt was made to include gray literature such as
bulletins, project reports, and meeting papers.

In the last two decades, how many articles have

been published on SIA?
How was SIA labeled social impact assessment or social assessment?
What is the content of refereed SIA articles? Do
the papers report findings about social impacts or
is the focus on procedures and process?
Do authors cite previous research in an attempt
to build a knowledge base or is past research
ignored?
SIA research has been published in related social
science journals including Society and Natural
Resources, Environment and Behavior, Human
Ecology, Environmental Management, and Rural

Environmental Impact Assessment Review

Elsevier Science Publishers first published EIAR in
1980. The first editor was Lawrence Susskind of the
Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Teresa
Hill assumed editorial responsibilities in 1984.
Susskind was named the Chair of the International

Table 1. Content analysis of SIA articles appearing in Environmental Impact Assessment Review (EIAR) and Impact Assessment
and Project Appraisal (IAPA) from 1980, 1981 respectively to August 2000

EIAR
19802000
Total number of articles

IAPA
19812000

Totals

Percent

Explanation

533

450

983

Total number of SIA articles

60

100

160

16

SIA as percent of all

articles

Use the term social impact assessment (SIA)

56

78

134

84

Percent of SIA articles

Percent of SIA articles

Use the term social assessment (SA)

Number of citations of EIAR and IAPA

71

90

161

Number of citations of Guidelines and Princ iples for SIA

11

Number of citations of other refereed journals publishing

EIASIA articles

59

100

159

Number of SIA articles which did not cite a prev ious

EIAR or IAPA issue

40

60

100

63

Percent of SIA articles

SIA case studies findings about social impacts

35

50

85

53

Percent of SIA articles

SIA procedures and methods how to do it, etc

24

42

66

41

Percent of SIA articles

Number of articles providing a conceptual framework for

SIA

13

15

28

18

Percent of SIA articles

Note:

Percent of SIA articles

The Guidelines and Principles were reprinted in both EIAR and IAPA: the citations included in those two reprints are not included
in this analysis

Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal March 2002

SIA the orphan of the assessment process?

Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA) when it

was organized in Toronto in 1980. His research and
policy interests were, and still are, environmental
mediation.
In 1996, the editorship moved to the United
Kingdom under Eric Johnson, a chemist by training,
but now researching life cycle assessment and the
relationship between financial and environmental
performance. Initially a quarterly publication, EIAR
went to six issues a year in 1994.
Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal
IAPA is the official journal of the International
Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA). It first
appeared as the Impact Assessment Bulletin (through
volume 10, 1992). During the early years, the Bulletin appeared in a variety of formats and font sizes,
and two of the volumes extended over two years.
The first editors were the officers of IAIA and particularly Alan Porter and Fred Rossini of Georgia
Institute of Technology. Larry Canter of the University of Oklahoma was editor for volumes 3 and 4,
198485.
The publication appeared on a regular basis in
1986 when Tom Roper at the Rose-Hulman Institute
of Technology in Terra Haute, Indiana was named
editor and Mary Ann Pierce, managing editor. Dan
Bronstein and Nancy Genedell of Michigan State
University were made managing editor and editor,
respectively, in 1992. In the following year, the title
was shortened to Impact Assessment.
In 1998, Impact Assessment merged with Project
Appraisal the latter edited by John Weiss of Development and Project Planning Centre, University
of Bradford and Bill Page of Beech Tree Publishing,
and published by Beech Tree in the UK. Christopher
Wood and Paul Scott of the EIA Centre and
Department of Planning and Landscape, University
of Manchester in the UK, were named, respectively,
editor and associate editor in 1998. Wood was educated in chemistry and town and country planning,
while Scott has a background in environmental bio logy. Carys E Jones, with a background in environmental management, was named co-editor in 2001,
replacing Paul Scott.

finding of no significant impact (FONSI) is issued

and the proposed action is approved (McCold and
Saulsbury, 1998).
Under the US system, not all proposed actions
need a full-scale EIA, but all must be reviewed before approval. Following from the CEQ guidelines, a
social assessment (SA) is preliminary to determining
whether a full-scale SIA is needed.
The different terminology used to label social impacts creates confusion both for the user and those
seeking guidance in the decision process. We need
both an agreed label and a definition to continue the
codification and creation of knowledge about social
impacts.
By social impact assessment I mean the systematic analysis, in advance, of the likely impacts a
proposed action will have on the day-to-day life of
individuals and communities (Burdge, 1999, page
2). The Interorganizational Committee on Guidelines and Principles for SIA expands the definition
to include
all social and cultural consequences to human
populations of any public or private actions
that alter the ways in which people live, work,
play, relate to one another, organize to meet
their needs, and generally cope as members of
society.
Cultural impacts involve changes to the norms,
values, and beliefs of individuals that guide and
rationalize their cognition of themselves and society
(Burdge, 1998, page 93; King, 1998). It is also important to consider the proposed action in the context of appropriate national, state or provincial
environmental policy legislation (Burdge and
Vanclay, 1995, page 44).
So we do social impact assessment to help individuals and communities, as well as government and
private-sector organizations, to understand and better anticipate the possible social consequences on
human populatio ns and communities of proposed
development projects or policy changes (Burdge,
1999, page 2).
At least in the USA, the early EIAs included a
socioeconomic component that was intended to be
social impacts as required under the NEPA

Social impact assessment or social assessment?

Of the 160 papers with SIA content, 134 or 84%
used the term social impact assessment; five (3%)
used social assessment (Table 1). Terminology is
key for the US land management agencies following
from NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act,
1969) and the US Council on Environmental Quality
(CEQ) regulations of 1986. We must differentiate
environmental impact assessment (EIA) from an
environmental assessment (EA). The latter refers to
a preliminary assessment during scoping to determine whether a full-scale EIA is needed. If not, a
Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal March 2002

The different terminology to label

social impacts creates confusion for the
user and those seeking guidance in the
decision process: we need an agreed
label and a definition to continue the
codification and creation of knowledge
about social impacts

SIA the orphan of the assessment process?

legislation. However, engineers and landscape architects, who gave little attention to social effects, did
the early EIAs. Socioeconomic impacts became a
listing of demographic information for a project
area. If the proposed action was large, housing,
health, law enforcement and other infrastructure statistics were included. However, most of the socioeconomic data was descriptive of the past little
was done to project or assess based on likely future
change to human communities as a result of the proposed action.
The US Forest Service (managers of about 181
million acres of forest and range land) uses the term
social assessment. Most other US land-management
agencies followed, or called SIA simply social
analysis. When Forest Service administrators were
searching for a label to describe social effects they
complained that social impacts had a harsh connotation, as in hitting something.
John Hendee, a Forest Service social scientist and
Richard Gale of the University of Oregon, coined
the term social assessment. Hobson Bryan, of the
University of Alabama, introduced the term to New
Zealand during a sabbatical visit and Social Assessment became the title of a text by Taylor, Bryan and
Goodrich (1995). The Bureau of Land Management
funded a social effects study to determine appropriate content for social impact statements done on
western US energy-development projects. These
researchers also published a monograph using the
term social assessment in their title (Branch et al,
1984).
Francis and Jacobs (1999) have outlined the difficulties in getting SIA institutionalized within
World Bank project appraisal procedures. They use
social analysis to refer to the process, with a social
assessment as the outcome. While there is agreement among World Bank administrators that social
analysis is needed to assure sound projects, the
procedures, content and how the results will be used
in the decision process have yet to be formalized.
In addition to the labels social effects, social assessment and socioeconomic, SIA is also referred to
as human ecology, socio-technical, social appraisal
and social soundness analysis (USAID). Of the authors of the SIA articles in my analysis, 84% used
the term social impact assessment.

What events led to the orphan role?2

EIS and the Trans-Alaska pipeline
The US NEPA of 1969 was signed by then President
Richard Nixon. Under the new law, proponents of
development projects that involved US federal land,
money or jurisdiction, were required to file an environmental impact statement (EIS) detailing the impacts of the project on the environment and to
include the human environment.
In February 1970, the US Department of the
6

Interior (USDI) submitted a six-page EIS to accompany the permit application for the 800-mile TransAlaska pipeline from Prudhoe Bay on the North
Slope to the ice-free port of Valdez on Prince William Sound. Two days later the Friends of the Earth
and the Environmental Defense Fund (environmental organizations) filed suit contending that the
Interior Department EIS statement failed to deal
adequately with a host of environmental problems
ranging from damage to the pipeline from hot oil
melting the permafrost to the impact on the annual
migration of several caribou herds as a result of the
pipeline barrier. Residents of Fairbanks , Alaska also
wondered what could be done with all those construction workers who would flock to Alaska to
work on the pipeline (Dixon, 1978).
Three years later the permit to build the pipeline
was issued. In the meantime, the EIS statement had
grown to six feet deep. More importantly, most of
the potential environmental damage had been dealt
with and solved to the satisfaction of the courts, the
environmentalists and the Alyeska Pipeline
Company.
Unfortunately, as one Inuit chief pointed out, the
impacts on both the native and non-native Alaskan
people were never addressed. Would traditional cultures and a way of life be changed by so massive
of a construction project? What about the influx of
transient workers who shared a different dialect of
the English language and exhibited unfamiliar life
styles?
Obviously, with a total population of 351,000 (in
1973) the state of Alaska could provide only a small
fraction of the estimated 42,000 persons who worked
on the pipeline at its peak. Even though the NEPA
legislation requires that social impacts be included in
EISs, they seldom were. The Alaska pipeline inquiry
focused exclusively on biophysical impacts while
social impacts on native populations were not considered until after the application was approved.
In 1974, Chief Justice Thomas Berger of the
British Columbia Supreme Court began inquiries
regarding the proposed Mackenzie Valley Pipeline
from the Beaufort Sea to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The social and cultural impact of the proposed
development on in digenous populations was the reason for declining the permit (Berger, 1983).
Because of these and other related developments
the concern for the social impact of development on
the human populations emerged. C P Wolf convened
the first research symposium on social impact assessment in 1973 during a meeting of the Environmental Design Research Associates (an association
of architects and landscape architects who did many
of the early environmental impact statements see
Wolf, 1974).
The Alaska pipeline provided the parameters or
terms of reference for the biophysical impacts, and
many of the findings from that assessment were incorporated in the initial CEQ EIA guidelines of 1973
but no social impacts. The final CEQ guidelines
Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal March 2002

SIA the orphan of the assessment process?

In the absence of a requirement, social

impacts were rarely included in
assessments by the consulting firms
who did EIS for US federal agencies:
more damaging, no funds were
available to assemble the findings
about social impacts

of 1978 did not formally mention social impact assessment. The 1986 revised EIA guidelines (CEQ,
1986) also failed to incorporate social impacts other
than the vague term socioeconomic impacts
(Llewellyn and Freudenburg, 1990).
In the absence of a requirement, social impacts
were rarely included in assessments by the consulting firms who did EIS for US federal agencies. More
damaging, no funds were available to assemble the
findings about social impacts uncovered in these
assessments. Furthermore, community-based socialscience research findings on rural industrialization,
water impoundments, highways, energy projects and
rural recreational and tourism development were not
linked to the new field of social impact assessment.
Displacement of SIA by public involvement
The second event that doomed SIA in the 1980s was
the focus on environmental mediation and public
involvement (Burdge and Robertson, 1990). EIAR
had 40 less SIA articles than IAPA, but much space
was devoted to environmental mediation and environmental dispute resolution. These two procedures
are practice-specific and not research into practice.
Unfortunately, US federal land-management
agencies embraced public involvement as a substitute for SIA and quickly called it community input.
The rationale was simple people are humans and
thus social, so if we consult the community through
public involvement we have taken care of social impacts. Managers with a technical background failed
to understand that determining how a project would
alter the life of the affected community requires systematic assessment, not consultation. People can
only guess how a proposed action will alter the life
of their community.
A social impact assessment provides direction
based on research findings from similar situations in
the past. Dispute resolution and public involvement
are pedagogical in nature practitioners report
techniques that work best in practice settings. The
painstaking process of pulling together the findings
from the available SIA studies is a discipline-based
research effort. Of the 60 SIA papers in EIAR, 21 or
one third of my count appeared in one special issue,
volume 10, issues 1 and 2, pages 1244. This means
Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal March 2002

only two SIA articles appeared on the average in the

other 19 volume years.

Impact of Guidelines on SIA research3

SIA variables point to measurable change in human
population, communities, and social relationships
resulting from a development project or policy
change. Gleaned from research on local community
change, rural industrialization, reservoir and highway development, natural resource development,
and social change in general, the Interorganizational
Committee on Guidelines and Principles for Social
Impact Assessment (1994) recommended a list of
SIA variables under the general headings of: population characteristics; community and institutional
structures; political and social resources; individual
and family changes; and community resources.
Population characteristics means present population
and expected change; ethnic and racial diversity,
influxes and outflows of temporary residents as well
as the arrival of seasonal or leisure residents.
Community and institutional structures refers to the
size, structure and level of organization of local government to include linkages to the larger political
systems. They also include historical and present
patterns of employment and industrial diversific ation, the size and level of activity of voluntary associations, religious organizations and interest groups
and, most importantly, how these institutions relate
to each other.
Political and social resources refer to the distribution of power authority, the identification of interested and affected parties as well as the leadership
capability and capacity within the community or
region.
Individual and family changes refer to factors that
influence the daily life of individuals and families,
including attitudes, values, perceptions, family characteristics and friendship networks. These changes
range from attitudes toward the policy to an alteration in family and friendship networks to perceptions
of risk, health, and safety.
Community resources include patterns of natural
resource and land use; the availability of housing
and community services to include health, police
and fire protection and sanitation facilities. A key to
the continuity and survival of human communities is
their historical, archaeological and cultural resources. Under this paradigm of SIA variables, the
committee also considered possible changes for indigenous populations and religious sub-cultures.
If these Guidelines and Principles (G&Ps) were
helping to organize the research on SIA, beginning

SIA the orphan of the assessment process?

in 1995 we would expect to see them cited in research papers. As shown in Table 1, only 11 or 7%
of the SIA articles cited them. However, the time
from paper submission to publication could be two
years. A few recent articles have cited the G&Ps
(Denq and Allenhofel, 1997; Seebohm, 1997). We
have no follow-up study showing that the G&Ps are
followed in the assessment process (Patterson and
Williams, 1998), only anecdotal evidence that practitioners find them useful.

Consultation of previous SIA studies

The lack of good case studies is symptomatic of one
of the problems in the field. Consulting firms do
most of the EIAsSIAs, but receive no rewards for
publishing in refereed journals. Because few case
studies are reported that utilized the SIA variables
from previous research, we have little opportunity to
track cumulative findings.
The results of the citation analysis shown in Table
1 are troubling, at least to me. The 160 SIA articles
cited another SIA article on the average only one
time. Granted early articles could not cite the two
journals, but we might expect that in time citations
would become more numerous and that recent papers would include extensive citations. In fact, there
is little evidence of accumulation. My experience as
a reviewer for both journals (and it appears to be
supported by the information given in Table 1) is
that authors simply do not cite past SIA articles from
the very journals to which they are submitting the
paper.
I recognize that not all SIA research is reported in
EIAR and IAPA. Other journals previously listed do
report SIA findings. However, the citation by authors of SIA research in other scholarly publications
was low on average only one citation per article
(Table 1). Particularly discouraging is the observation that the number of citations was exactly equal to
the number of articles. So if authors were not citing
research in refereed publications, what were they
citing?
During the 1980s, all too often, no references
accompanied the paper. This is an indication, at least
to me, that the author(s) failed to consult the literature and/or the editors and the reviewers did not
insist on a literature review. If citations were included, they were project reports or papers given
at meetings, making it impossible to locate the publication and check primary data sources.
Despite our good intentions, the research on SIA
has yet to be cumulative. The goal of science and
knowledge generation is to build on previous research, to replicate and expand in incremental fashion. In disciplinary journals, we cite previous articles
as justification for our research hypotheses. The
research on case studies found in the two impact
assessment journals seldom cited social impacts reported in previous articles. So what we read is not
8

cumulative one paper does not lead to research

hypotheses or conceptual direction for the next.4

Future of social impact assessment

The first problem is the lack of an agreed label to go
along with an accepted definition. Despite the lack
of adoption by the World Bank and some US Land
Management Agencies, social impact assessment
seems the most accepted and used terminology. Secondly, to become institutionalized EIASIA must be
a statutory requirement (Meidinger and Freudenburg, 1983), otherwise agencies and consulting firms
that do EIA will not include SIA. The requirement
must extend to international bilateral aid, donor and
lending agencies.
Thirdly, public involvement must be recognized
as a pedagogical exercise for what it is intended
to involve the public in the decision process, not a
way to measure social impacts in advance of a project development or policy change. Fourthly, SIA
research must build on previous knowledge. The
Guidelines and Principles for SIA provides a broad
categorization of SIA variables around which research can collect. Research must build and expand
that knowledge base.
Finally, the editors and reviewers of SIA research
for EIAR and IAPA, as well as the other social science journals, must insist that papers build on the
present SIA knowledge base. A detailed literature
review is a must for a scholarly journal.
Getting research based on interdisciplinary social
science concepts into applied policy decisions is difficult under the best of circumstances, and the more
disciplines the greater the problem. What we need is
extensive evaluation and follow-up research to verify whether SIA variables are actually predicting and
performing the way we said they would.
Unfortunately, ex-post facto research is seldom
funded and the sub-field of SIA is a good example.
While all agree that environmental alteration has
human consequences and we need to know about
these in advance of the decision, we have few studies that show whether the predicted social impacts
actually occurred (Burdge, 1998). Of the SIA papers, 53% dealt with case studies and findings about
social impacts, but only 28 or 18% reported a conceptual framework as a guide to organizing their
research (Table 1).
Agreement on a conceptual framework for SIA is
a topic for future IAIA meetings. For now, we need
to focus efforts on getting good SIA case studies into
our two impact assessment journals and integrate
social impacts within the assessment process.

Notes
1. A possible exception is Australia and New Zealand. See, for
example, Dale et al (2001).

Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal March 2002

SIA the orphan of the assessment process?

2. The details in this section come from Burdge (1998; 1999).
3. This section is abstracted from the original, which was
published as Interorganizational Committee on Guidelines and
Principles for Social Impact Assessment (1994).
4. Some of the monographs of case studies have been helpful,
but unless they become part of the serialized literature, they
soon become lost. See for example: Murdock et al (1999) on
the study of siting waste facilities; Finsterbusch (1980) on the
social impacts of highway construction; and Rickson et al
(1995) on the impacts of uranium mining on aboriginal communities in Australia.

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(editor), Handbook of Environmental Impact Assessment, volume 1 (Blackwell Science, Oxford) pages 301326. To order
<http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/>.
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Selected bibliography
Barrow, C J (1997), Environmental and Social Impact Asses sment: An Introduction (Arnold, London).
Becker, Henk A (1997), Social Impact Assessment: Method and
Experience in Europe, North America, and Developing World
(HCL Press Limited, London, UK and Bristol, PA.
Finsterbusch, K (1985), State of the art in social impact asses sment, Environment and Behavior, 17(2), pages 193221.
Finsterbusch, K (1995), In praise of SIA: a personal review of the
field of social impact assessment, Impact Assessment, 13(3),
pages 229252.
Freudenburg, William R (1986), Social m
i pact assessment,
Annual Review of Sociology, 12, pages 451-478.
Freudenburg, William R, and Robert Gramling (1992), Community impacts of technological change: toward a longitudinal
perspective, Social Forces, 70(4), pages 937955.
Freudenburg, William R, and Robert E Jones (1992), Criminal
behavior and rapid community growth: examining the evidence, Rural Sociology, 56 (4), pages 619645.
Freudenburg, William R, and Kenneth M Keating (1985), Applying sociology to policy: social science and the environmental
impact statement, Rural Sociology, 50(4), pages 578605.
Gamble, D J (1978), The Berger Inquiry: an impact assessment
process, Science, 199(3), March, pages 946952.
Goodrich, Colin G, and C Nicholas Taylor (editors) (1995), Special issue on social impact asses sment, Project Appraisal ,
10(3), September.
Gramling, Robert, and William R Freudenburg (1992), Opportunity-threat, development, and adaptation: toward a
comprehensive framework for social impact assessment,
Rural Sociology, 57(2), pages 216-234.
Greider, Thomas, and Lorraine Garkovich (1994), Symbolic
landscapes: the social construction of nature and the environment, Rural Sociology, 59(1), pages 124.
Howitt, Richard (1993), Social assessment as applied peoples
geography, Australian Geographical Studies , 31, pages
127140.