The Guide is a tool for practitioners at all levels - social scientists, agency employees, community leaders, volunteers - to complete social impact assessments (SIAs) efficiently and effectively. The Guide is a how-to manual that provides the users with a step-by-step process easily followed by persons with minimal social science training. The Guide is organized into three sections: Chapters 1-6 provides the background, a short history, the conceptual model, the SIA scoping process and an explanation as to how to obtain data to measure SIA variables. Chapters 7-11 correspond to the five categories of SIA variables - population change, community and institutional arrangements, communities in transition, individual and family impacts and community infrastructure needs. Chapters 12-13 provide worksheets for summarizing SIA variables, and how resulting data may be used in the SIA mitigation/enhancement process.

Rabel J. Burdge is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he held tenure appointments from 1976 to 1996 in the Institute for Environmental Studies and the Departments of Agricultural and Consumer Economics (Rural Sociology), Leisure Studies (now Recreation, Sport and Tourism) and Urban and Regional Planning. He was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology and Huxley College of the Environment at Western Washington University in Bellingham, where he taught courses on environmental sociology and social impact assessment from 1996-2012. He has written over 200 scholarly articles and papers on social change in rural communities, natural resource and environmental issues, needs assessment surveys, the use of public involvement in the resource decision making process, the social and economic impacts of development, the sitting of hazardous and conventional waste facilities, as well as natural resource recreation management.