Policy and Historic Preservation: A Preliminary Research Agenda

My basic premise for today’s talk is that research, especially social science research, has been largely missing from policy debates in preservation. I would like to suggest that the preservation field needs to embrace a more rigorous, coordinated and empirically grounded research agenda. My talk will cover three areas. First, I will describe four categories of research questions. Second, I will discuss where we might look for the data and information to begin to answer these questions. And, third, I will highlight interesting work being done by social scientists in other research domains and suggest ways that the preservation field might draw upon these ideas and methodologies.