These initiatives required government agencies to justify their budgetary allocations. All of this has led to a new movement to look at indicators in a different way. While the social indicators movement of the 1960s and 1970s was intended for institutions and governments, the new indicators movement is additionally meant to be popular in nature. That movement includes both citizen activists and government initiatives. It is strongly related to the sustainable development movement and relates social justice to environmental quality.
Social indicators become part of a holistic system for monitoring progress.
It is our hope that this annotated bibliography will provide a basis for those interested in improving social indicators of community health and sustainability. The field is vast. We have not captured everything in it, but we believe this overview provides a solid starting point for understanding what has already been documented on measuring social well-being. We used several tools and search engines to develop this bibliography. A similar search was done in the University of Iowa library system, and one trip was made to the University of Iowa to find sources not available in the ISU library or through inter-library loan.