Bob Leik
Disaster Response

Overview

Q: Well, first could you just give us a real brief, two-minute, one-minute summary of the research project?

A: You really expect me to be that brief? This particular project that we'll talk about grew out of a longer-term project on studying response to warnings of natural disasters: hurricanes, flash floods, a little earthquake, tornado. And we had been doing that work for three years and something when Mt. St. Helens blew. Since my wife and I are both from Washington state earlier, and we feel very close to that part of the country, we were saying "why aren't we doing something out there as long as we're doing this disaster work?" So within something like four months, which is very unusual, we managed to obtain funding to extend our work to study the consequences of Mt. St. Helens, for people living in that area, primarily focused on the family stress and relocation decisions and so on; do people want to get out, away from something like that, how does it affect their lives, how much stress do they feel under, that kind of question.

Theory

Q: What was the role of theory, if any, in this research?

A: There is a lot of theory behind what we did, but it's not most of it well known to sociologists. There's a lot of theory regarding response to disasters, and of course we were well-steeped in that for having done the other work for all that time. Then there's a variety of theoretical materials that have to do with family stress, family coping, family relations in general, decision-making, things of that sort. So we were drawing on all of that literature and the measures that had been developed for studying those kinds of things.

Q: What would you say were the main research questions?

A: To what extent did Mt. St. Helens affect the lives of these families, in sense of stress levels, discussions of what they should be doing, whether they should get out or not, attempt to find further information, decisions that they did make, what that seemed to have to do with their interaction patterns, the extent to which there's consensus or not in the family on issues like this. And then a few broader things; we did have a few community level questions that we raised.

Q: By the way, what year was it that Mt. St. Helens…?

A: 1980. It first erupted in March and then the main was May 18th, and it really blew its stack.

Q: And you did the research in the year following that?

A: Well we were out there; we were actually in the field six months after that May 18th. So within that year we managed to do all the field work the first time around within a month or so, it took a couple of months, and then six months later we were back with some follow-up stuff. So all within about a year of that major blow. There were four other eruptions of the mountain, but most people don't bother to know about, but they were not huge lava flows or anything, they were mostly steam vents 50,000 feet is pretty impressive when you're standing looking at it in a nearby community.

Design

Q: Well, now that you're talking about fieldwork, there was also an experimental component?

A: It's also fieldwork. There were three components to what we did in St. Helens. First, we did telephone interviews with samples of families in three different communities in Washington State. We incidentally also did a smaller sub-sample in Minneapolis/St. Paul, because we wanted a control. If they're not in the area that's being affected by the mountain, how does that affect how they respond to what we're doing? Those interviews lasted about a half-hour. There were 152 family interviews, I mean household interviews but we just talked to one representative on the telephone. We had another sample of three-person families. If they agreed to do this more elaborate project then they were removed from the list of just phone interviews. But the more elaborate work we required intact husband, wife, and a teenager in the home families, because we wanted to get age and gender variation, and the family character to it. Each of those people in total of 60 households out there, and 10 back here, were interviewed regarding all these things, their experiences and so on and so forth, separately, that is, husband separate interview, with wife, separate interview, with teenager. And then, all of those three were brought together. At first we had a trailer, we had in fact a mobile lab. It turned out the ash fit into the computer so we had to stop that. You know ash was all over the place out there, even six months later you'd drive along and it would just flow up in the road and so on. So we finally had to back off and put the computers in a room in a motel and have people come to it. I like the idea of a mobile computer lab; I think that was a good thought. Anyway, the structure of the experiments was such that each person had a separate computer, at the time we were using Terak computers, which was one of the first ones to provide decent graphic capability, all black and white back then, but still. What we did was create a game simulation; actually, we adapted one that we had developed earlier for the other hazards project. Each person sat at the computer and ran their own business game. They were in fact running a business; they could make decisions about employment and investments and so on and so forth, a lot of aspects of normal business operation, enough that it would be interesting, and hopefully make them more focused on the business than on the mountain because that's the way most people live, you know, not sitting around waiting for, worried about a mountain. But then fourteen times during that hour and a half experimental session, they were simultaneously interrupted with information about the mountain. Some of it was just a report like there was steam, or there was minor quakes or whatever, four of the messages were much more serious, as spaced across time, and one involved an eruption. What we did was to ask that each time they saw one of these messages that they decide did they want to close up their business and get out or continue their business operation. They could choose to do either, if they closed up their business, that's sort of like the end of it for right then, although typically they did not, anyway, three times I think it was, possibly, no, the four times that we had the major messages we've stopped the experiments, they're all in the same room but they're facing away from each other, playing their games. We stopped the experiments and said "OK, now the three of you discuss, as a family, what you want to do? You got your businesses going but your home is here, and so there is this threat." The threats were graphically shown so that, for example, you would see the spread of ash throughout the state of Washington, from the latest eruption or something like that, on the map, and there would be a description of the nature of did the difficulty, flooding on the Cowlitz river or something of that sort. Then they were told "you gotta decide, as a family, are you packing out or are you staying, or what?" And those discussions were tape-recorded. Some of them are fascinating, partly because of the nature of the inter-personal connections involved, partly because of the very different agendas of the men and women and kids. So it's almost always the case that the men were more concerned about business aspects and women were more concerned about safety aspects and the kids were more concerned about friends, school, that sort of thing.

Q: Could they talk to each other through the, other than these discussions, could they talk to each other?

A: No, they were running independent games, the games were connected only for the purpose of the warnings, so that it's sort of like saying "you go off to your office, you're not sitting there talking to your family while you're at the office."
Q: And the communications from you, the experimenter, were by computer also.

A: Absolutely, yeah.

Q: And how many times did they discuss verbally?

A: Four. Four times. And those discussions sometimes lasted 10 minutes or so, sometimes only two or three. Early on it was likely to say "Well, anybody want to move?" "No, no I'm doing fine," "No, I'm making money, let's hang." "Ok, we'll stay," and, that's about it. Other times, we have in the final report we submitted, quite extensive discussions. And often those discussions linked directly to the experiences that they had been having with Mt. St. Helens. So it was quite realistic for many of them. One of the intriguing things is that that realism is not there at all with the cases that we looked at in the Twin Cities. They just did not have any sense of the mountain; they didn't know any of the geographic references were. We could show them the map but it didn't make that much difference; it was like talking about science fiction or something.

Q: Well, in the Twin Cities control site, were the subjects given a warning that they ash might be coming to Minneapolis, or…

A: No, they were given the same game but they were told they were in whatever community out there.

Q: Oh, I see.

A: So that they're supposed to be playing the same situation as the people out there were playing. But of course they don't have familiarity with it, and it just didn't have the same sense. Which we expected. The thing that almost all of our disaster research showed is that response is very low. Very few people really do anything. Much of the other project focused on… but we had about 7,000 household interviews in the other project, or nearly 8,000. We had interviews with official representatives on site in 31 communities, you know, police, fire, emergency management, and so on and so forth. And it was a very extensive study of the whole process of how a community responds to a major warning. In one community of those, and they were all facing, these were real warnings in that case, they were all facing something like a major flood or whatever. In one sitting, nobody did anything. In one, at the most I think 40 or 50% of the people, of the households did any kind of preparation, and often, the civil defense arrangements were quite confused. I think probably the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Weather Service and NSF who funded the larger project were quite surprised to find some of that confusion and lack of response and so on. For the St. Helens, again, at the most I think about 30% of the families in the closest community of that is, the most in the path of the mountain, decided to do anything like pack up and leave in the game simulation. Most of them said, "Well, I don't know, I don't think it's going to do it again, let's tough it out," and so on. One of the things we thought most intriguing was if one of the three didn't want to go, almost invariably they didn't go. You know, instead of the two out of three wins, one reluctant out of three would win. That means it really takes an exceptional impetus to get people to decide to go. One of the obvious reasons is you got equity in a home, you can't just walk off and leave it, you've got a business going, you can't just walk off and leave it; nobody's going to buy it if everybody leaves town, you know, you just really going to lose your shirt if you just say, "Well, we gotta get out of here." So people decide they'll try to tough it out and hope they don't get smothered or something. It's not an easy process. And in some cases, the decisions were clear and the discussions were clear, it was not an easy decision.

Q: Now, in Washington State, you had three different communities that you did this research in. They were different distances from the mountain.

A: Right. And they the difference in terms of the impact also, Longview/Kelso is slightly southwest of the mountain, it's closest to it, but the mountain blew to the east. So they did not get the ash. They did, because they're along the river, they did get flood problems, enormous flood problems. For over a year, the feds were out there drenching the river daily to try to get the ash out of it. Yakima is in the direct path to the east, it's 90 miles or something like that, and there was a period of at least a day and a half where they had no daylight in Yakima after that major eruption. Huge amounts of ash, great disruption of all sorts of things. Pullman was the third site, and it's on the east end of Washington State, it's a couple hundred miles or so, and we did that as much as anything to get some sense of, "OK, they experienced it, they had ash, they did have some period of darkness for awhile, but what effect will that have?" Now there's a difference in the nature of the economy of Yakima and Pullman, so it's a little hard to know to what extent that might matter; Pullman's a university town, Yakima is not, so there may have been some differences due to that. To some extent you're subject to those problems in that kind of fieldwork.

Q: So you had those three towns and then the Twin Cities, as four different sites. Did you control the stimuli, experimental stimuli in any way, or is it the same for…?

A: It's exactly the same model because we wanted to test propositions regarding distance from and danger from the mountain. So the site is the sole purpose of that flood danger primarily in Longview/Kelso, really in the path of the mountain in Yakima, effected but not that drastic in Pullman. And there are clear effects in the data. The likelihood of moving, closing down the business whatever all was greatest in Yakima.

Q: Ok, back 20 years. If you were to do it over again, 20 years ago, would you design it the same way or would you design it a different way?

A: Mostly I don't think we'd change much. I think the things that would be nice of course would have been much more extensive data. You know we have 50 household interviews and 20 experimental families and in-depth interviews in each of those three communities. That's not a very large N; statistically you run into problems with trying to demonstrate significance. You can have correlations of .3 and that still isn't significant, or .4 or something like that. So there was that particular problem. I would surely like to have had it more extensive. It would be desirable to do the same kind of work with other sorts of disasters, because there's very unique character to a mountain erupting. When it comes to floods or tornadoes or something, most of the people in the tornado belt know it's going to happen again and it's going to happen again, and so on. And the same with hurricanes and floods. That's not the case with a mountain. Although some people surprisingly some of the people did anticipate that St. Helens was just going to keep popping, that it was going to continue to be a problem in their lives. But the thing is we don't have a comparison in terms of developing general models of response to this kind of thing, we don't have comparative data of that degree of experimental simulations and the in-depth interviews and so on for the other kinds of hazard.

Measurement

Q: You mentioned the volcanic ash as a problem in the data collection. Were there other challenges, other problems in the data collection?

A: Well, a couple of things. One of course is the difficulty of … and this doesn't get into data collection so much, it's whether having restricted our attention to husband/wife/teenager families is eliminating certain aspects of the community that really need to be studied. We did it because we wanted to get the sense of family process. And that's partly because I was running the family study center at the time. But the question of representativeness is still hanging there.

Q: When you interviewed in the phone interviews, did you select a random adult from the household?

A: We, I wrote a computer program at the time, because they didn't have those things then, that selected randomly. And this was fairly elaborate because we had to go through actual telephone directories and so on, but the only thing is that when we would call, we would say, "Are you an intact family with a teenager in the house?" At least, that was our sampling criterion. The interesting thing is we had several people say, "No, but can't we talk to you anyway, we're scared!"

Data Analysis

Q: How did you analyze the data and what were the main conclusions?

A: The data were analyzed… OK, in terms of the household surveys, the phone surveys we were just asking what their experiences were, to what extent they had tried to get further information, to what extent they had discussed and made any decisions about them and so on. So mostly we're looking at percentages, and how that's affected by where they are in relation to the mountain and to what extent experience influenced, their own experience, or experience of people they knew, influenced their decision, and clearly there are some correlations there that are quite relevant: those who had the worst experiences were most likely to have really seriously discussed to take some action and so on. Although there seems to be some sense of those who had a specific experience, almost figuring, "OK, now we're used to this stuff, we can hack it, we don't have to get out of here," but they were serious about inquiring. One of the things that kept coming up in all the disaster research was, "Well, jeez, you move and what, you go, you can go," you know, they'll name some state, "But then you're gonna get clobbered with a hurricane, or you're can go someplace else and you'll have a tornado, well jeez, why not stay here, we know what this thing is." And that, no matter what the disaster was, that's a common response, "We know what we're in now, we don't want to get into something that's got worse problems that we don't know about." Well, anyway, as far as the experimental stuff is concerned, and we did analyze not only the discussions for the nature of them, to what extent they drew on real experience and so on, but the relevance of age and gender that is, family role, in the decision process, and then, the husbands were the most influential and then wives and husbands and wives were often fairly close agreement except for some minor factors. Teenagers were usually out of it. I mean, they just really didn't have the same sense of costs or options or whatever all. So for example we would ask, "What would it cost you to move," and the husbands might say something "$20,000, $30,000, whatever" and the wives might say, "$3-4,000, and the kids would say, "a couple hundred bucks," you know, and that's the way it would go.

Q: About the role of jobs, if one or the other, if both of the spouses had jobs, did that make a difference?

A: We didn't have enough cases of dual employment at that point, that would help that much to analyze the data that way. But it was clear that loss of job and loss of equity were really serious concerns. They've got no place to go if they leave, and they've got nothing to go to, you know, no work out there waiting for them, they're just gonna really be in a bad way. If they evacuated for a while, that's not so bad, you know, they could like take a vacation or something. But to really seriously consider a permanent move, it's sort of like, "Well, let's take a chance on getting buried."

Q: You mentioned family stress; what was the role of family stress in the study?

A: Well, we did look at how much stress the individual members were under, in fact, we developed a technique at the time which has been used in a couple of projects since, called the "stress graph." We laid out a year's worth of month on horizontal scale and put in some events like the May 18th eruption, and Easter, and so on and so forth, some things that would be easy markers, and a 1-10 vertical scale, and we would talk them through, what we're talking about by stress, explain it to them, and say "What we want you to do is think about when you were under the most stress, when was that and how much would you put that on a 1-10 scale," and I put a point there. And then, "When were you under the least stress, and how much," and so on, put a point there, and keep working back and forth until they finally filled in pretty much all of the high points and the lower points and so on, and then say "Ok, now connect it with a line, all these dots, and look it over, and this is your graph, if you need to go back and change some stuff, fine, but let's make sure it represents how you felt over this period." And I'm reporting a year's time here, which means if it recall issue. Clearly this relatively short 2-3 month period, right around the May 18th eruption, well, starting with the March initial eruption, huge high stress levels. All members of the family, typically the teenagers not as bad as the parents. But then you know, the teenagers just "Hmmm, well…" Um, typically then that went down. Individual events created stresses beyond like that one person, one woman, who had a major family crisis; not within that family but like a sibling or something, I can't remember the detail here, her curve went up, but the rest of them didn't. So the graph is reflecting individual stuff, most of the way, but the common response to the main eruption. Now the main conclusion out of that is that there was a very highly correlated period for all three members around that main eruption. But once you get past that, there's virtually no correlation across time of the stress levels of the individual members. We've since used a procedure on Minnesota farm families facing eviction and one of my students is using it now in her dissertation and so on. You've got some very interesting patterns of how people are experiencing stress over time. The question then is how that affects the family process, the decision-making and so on.

Q: How did it affect the decision making in the simulation game?

A: Well, now the simulation game, we didn't try to measure stress in the game, it would have been a little bit strange. It's clear that the main eruptions and the main events in the game caused serious discussion. And parallel then to the data from the interviews, the period of really common, heavy stress, obviously generated a lot of conversation among the families about what do we do, do we do anything at all, and also about searching for further information, that one of the things that's critical is do they say, "Oh well, I don't care, I don't know anything about it." Or do they go out and say, "Let's find out what's really going on here, I think we can get more information." So stress levels and information seeking and coping methods and so on, all are interconnected. Again, in the interviews, the coping tended to be of a positive sort, talk with friends, go to church, you know, sort of re-affirm, so on and so forth, rather than negative like drinking and goofing off and stuff of that sort.

Q: With the, in the experiment, the families that experienced heavy stress during the volcanic eruption itself, were they more likely to…?

A: Oh, yes, there was some connection between their actual experiences with the mountain and their behavior in the simulation. I can't quote statistics at this point. But there is a reality to the simulation in that extent, that we could show correlations between what went on in their real lives and what went on in the simulation game. I think the only reason that works, and it certainly wouldn't have had any connection for the Minnesota sample, but the reason it works is that this is an important thing that happened to them, and then the game regenerates some of those feelings, and some of the consideration of the problems and so on. A well constructed simulation like that can be a stimulus for all kinds of remembrance discussion, so on and so forth that helps explore how things actually went on.

Interpretation

Q: What were the main audiences for this study?

A: We did not, well, we did publish 2-3 things in academic journals, but our concern was the federal agencies who are primarily focused on how to manage disasters. The main study, as I say, was the large, four-year, multi-million dollar, was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, or Federal Emergency Management Agency, as the name changed, and the Weather Service. When St. Helens blew, we talked to them about the possibility of extending and they were saying, "Well, this isn't really our bailiwick exactly." So we called National Institute of Mental Health and knew that they had funding for stress kinds of concerns. With every other situation, we have a setup that would be easy to get into the field, how did we do this, and we're told, well, if you go for a normal kind of grant it's gonna take you six months to a year, but if one of the agencies that you already have a grant with, a federal agency, is willing, we could fund through them, we can transfer funds. And, as I said, well, it really isn't quite in FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the person we work with says "Oh, of course, that would be great." So, in relatively short time, we got whatever amount of money it was for St. Helens, around $100,000 or something transferred into the FEMA budget and we're off. It's a very unusual way of getting money fast.

Q: From FEMA's point of view, from the policy makers' point of view, what was their main interest and what did they feel they got out of the study?

A: I can't answer the last part because we didn't, although our meetings, we had a large advisory board representing a variety of agencies, far beyond those three, and our impression from those meetings is that they were all very interested in what was going on and in the results and so on. I didn't know that I could find any specific policy changes. We make some very strong recommendations regarding the things that seem to be the obvious obstacles to people really paying attention. I think it undoubtedly had 2 or 3 kinds of effect, one of the things, we ran some experiments for the main project also, that were different from the St. Helens' ones, in that we systematically varied how, what the quality of information that was coming in was and how rapidly information came in, and we can show with some mathematical modeling that the likelihood of early response decreases the better the information and the faster it comes in. But there's a good basis for that. You can demonstrate logically, mathematically, as well as empirically, that if you know that you got good information coming in, likely it'd be coming in soon, you don't really have to make up your mind yet, you can wait and see. But if you know very little and some big splat occurs on the screen and you say "Ah, I don't know whether I'll hear anything, I better…." You know, and panic time. So those data were showing that with a sense of trust that they would get continually high-grade information. In this case again, visual, not just in the best probable information, maps showing where our problem was, how close it was, and so forth, that that was critical in the systematic decision process; it generated a nice smooth curve of response, as you get closer to a real possible effect, that bothered some of the emergency people, because they want to get people out right away. On the other hand, it does mean it's a systematic and predictable process, rather than a chaotic process on the part of the people's response. At the time, graphic representation of things like encroaching storms and so on didn't even happen on T.V. And now you take a look at these all elaborate graphs and patterns and weather patterns and so on and so forth, and what we're saying is the visual made a huge difference and they were starting to experiment at that time with this sort of visual graphics. I don't know whether we had any impact on the development of that, but we were certainly saying "this is the critical feature, getting a visual sense of where it is and where you are and how that's encroaching on your space."

Q: So you can't be sure but you could have had a major impact on the kind of communication that they used?

A: I think so. Right.

Q: What do you think was the most interesting thing to come from this study?

A: Well, the St. Helens stuff, the most interesting had to do with the family dynamics and the process and the fact, this one little fact I tossed out before, the one reluctant soul can basically keep the whole family there. But if one person said, "I don't want to move," they didn't move. It suggests that the bias is to not moving anyway, and the fear of one or maybe even a couple or three members is often not enough to drive them out of this sense of "Well, we'll just sort of tough it out." In fact, we did have some interviews with other people; one woman was saying, for example, "We live on the mountain, on the west face," so they weren't clobbered, "and my husband doesn't want to move, he likes it up there, and I'm just scared out of my skin," and she was coming to the Mental Health Center almost daily. But her husband didn't want to move, so they didn't move. There's a very non-democratic process in this sense, which is, as far as I know, not discussed in any theoretical treatise on families.

Q: Could you refresh my memory, I can't remember how major the Mt. St. Helens disaster was, where there any human casualties?

A: There were about 50 deaths, as I recall. Huge amounts of people that lost homes. There were livestock wiped out in enormous quantities. There was an area east of the mountain for at least a year or two afterwards that was totally desolate. I mean a huge, wide area there was nothing. If you say the films at the time, you could see great floods of lava and mud and so on just burying trees, burying animals, burying everything. It was in fact really devastating. As I mentioned before, it was like a day and a half of total darkness, and then there were inches of ash, people were using women's stockings over the carburetors of their cars because it was a way of filtering out the ash from the carburetor otherwise the cars wouldn't run, so on and so forth. A long period of time to get past that, as I also mentioned, the government was dredging the Cowlitz for well over a year on a 24 hour basis, just trying to keep the water flowing, it's a large river, and it was totally filled with silt. It would have just flooded the entire area.

Q: After this project was over, did you follow up with any other similar research?

A: No we haven't. We've done other stuff that has to do with family stress and coping and so on, but we haven't done any more disaster research. There's still problems with doing this kind of stuff, for the traditional academic, and if I can pontificate for a moment. We have a bias in our field that if you really want to advance in sociology, and that's true in other social sciences, you publish in the right journals, and that never has to do with applied work, it never has to do with helping solve problems out there, maybe it does for some of us in fields like criminology, but I've done an awful lot of stuff that's applied in character, and there's a folder over here with probably 20 or 30 publications that are all relevant to policy questions. I've been on a couple of presidential, that is, White House conferences, on a White House committee, and so on and so forth, done a lot of things that are policy relevant. Very little of that counts in the academic world. I think it's a travesty, because if anybody ought to know what to do about solving some of our problems, the people that have the intellectual basis ought to be doing that. We had a conference here a number of years ago, we happened to have five scholars visiting at the same time, and one of them was from Helsinki, Professor Haavio-Mannila, who has been the outstanding sociologist of Finland. One thing we were saying in the conference is, "Why don't we have more involvement in the policy process?" And she said, "I really don't understand the question because sociologists are all involved in the policy process in Finland. What's wrong here, why aren't you doing it?" So my view is that we really need to get out of our little circumscribed, our own journals and our own audience, and start talking to the real world, otherwise we're going to end up saying, "What happened to the budget? Nobody seems to care about us anymore."

Q: Did you see any link between the research you've been doing recently, particularly in Head Start, and the disaster research?

A: Well, only in the very general sense that they're both family projects, although the Head Start work is all single parent, female-headed families. They're both concerned with families under stress of various kinds; the problems are very different. We were not studying deficient processes in the Head Start families, particularly, although there is some of that in there. But it does give a broader sense of the range of problems that families face and how they approach those problems, because you wouldn't have the same kind of decision-making process in a single parent family as you would with a dual-parent, intact family and so on. Again, it's policy relevant. For 10 years we were studying those families and talking with fellow researchers doing Head Start research back in D.C. and so on. I think that some of the stuff that we've done there also has had some relevance for policy. Head Start is now far beyond what it's originally intended mission was, which was just to give kids an advantage getting into a school, because economically it didn't have that kind of basis before school, you know, no preschool, no people at home talking books and stuff like that. Now it's a very widespread palette of assistance to families, and it's sort of a "one-stop" center for all kinds of family help that helps integrate the system and makes it easier for people to work their way through it and somehow survive poverty, which is a very difficult circumstance. We saw some remarkably able and viable people managing in circumstances that none of us can imagine living in.

Q: Now, I didn't plan to ask this question but you've had a very illustrious career; about 40 years of research and so…

A: 41 years, simple…

Q: …um, you've been one of the noted mathematical sociologists, I mean, you've done a lot in that field, you've done a lot in the family area, you've developed some very creative experiments, particularly in your early years. As you look back on it, what was the most satisfying and what do you feel had the greatest contribution? That would be two different things.

A: Well, the most satisfying to me is problem solving in some sense. And therefore, the mathematical modeling, the computer simulations and linking that to more theoretical basis and so on, that's the most intriguing to me; it's the most fun. I like programming; I've been doing that for 30 years. It's like a gigantic crossword or jigsaw or whatever, and I really enjoy it. If it can be done with other people, I'm not a sole scholar, I don't like going in, closing the door, and shutting out the world and sitting there with my books and crud. I like exchanging ideas, working with people. The simulation work is done, but it has been done primarily with Barbara Meeker at Maryland, mathematical modeling early on was with Barbara also, Head Start work was with Professor Chalkley at St. Thomas and so on. A small group of really interesting colleagues is the sort of thing that's just an absolute delight. The most useful work, I don't know, I'm still inclined to think that if anybody bothered to pay attention, the policy-relevant stuff is the most important. But then, that's because importance is beyond the academic world, at least to me.

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