This paper appraises the potential of social area analysis - the identification and description of areas according to their social characteristics - for planning and policy-related research. The development of social area analysis is briefly described, from its roots in pre-war urban sociology into its modern form as a research method based on multivariate statistical techniques, notably principal components analysis and cluster analysis. A number of applications of this method in mainly British planning experience are then described, and the main strengths and weaknesses of social area analysis are considered in terms of the problems of interpreting the results, its accessibility for potential users and the utility of the method for typical planning research problems. A number of further applications are considered and the conclusion is drawn that social area analysis has limited but important uses for a wide variety of planning research exercises.
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