Abstract
As an extension based on the panel discussion in a symposium of the 2001 Annual Meeting of the Japan Sociological Society, I focus on the following five issues that I consider are relevant to the difficulty of social research. They are : (1) the concept of “the difficulty of social research;” (2) the necessity of panel surveys and its relation to the objective of social research; (3) the handling of imperfect data; (4) getting cooperation from survey subjects; and (5) informed consent and the protection of subjects' human rights.
