To continue to be an effective local educational leader in curricular change, fiscal policy making, and, above all, in planning for education, the school administrator must have a continuous flow of usable information on public opinion. The purpose of this book is to provide the administrator with practical methods for systematically monitoring change in his community. Organized as a manual, the various sections take the reader from problem identification, through information gathering by document search and community surveys, to information sorting and analysis, and finally to the point where findings can be brought together in a coherent fashion useful in resolving questions that affect policy making issues. Brief case studies are included to give some immediacy to the discussion of methods. Appended materials include tables of random numbers to aid in the selection of respondents for surveys, a table of chi-square values for the computation of significance, and an annotated bibliography of further resources. (Author/SL)