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Case Work Records. One of the first tasks of the statistician, in cooperation with the administrative officers and specialists in both the Washington office and the field, should be to perfect the forms to be used in recording and reporting. These forms should be specific and detailed and should provide for reporting each item regarded as essential. The question of what facts are or are not essential should not be left to the judgment of the individual field worker. He may have to report that he is unable to get certain facts regarded as essential by the office or the local supervising officers, but he should know definitely that they are wanted and that he is expected to secure them. The forms should, of course, be conveniently arranged for the field worker so that they may be filled with the minimum possible effort.

The forms should be accompanied by detailed instructions giving precise definitions of terms and discussions as to how different types of cases are to be recorded. They should be issued in loose leaf form, so that amendments and additions can be made conveniently and each field worker be kept constantly advised of the requirements. Enough attention has not been given to this phase of recording and reporting in the past, and as an inevitable consequence different field workers have made their own interpretations of the meaning of questions asked by the office, with a resulting lack of comparability of the figures supplied. For example, how many Indians are farming? In some instances anyone making a garden or tilling a few acres, however indifferently, is reported as a farmer, whereas other superintendents include as farmers only those making a living or a substantial part of their living from farming. In the area covered by the present survey the number of Indian farmers as reported by the Service was almost exactly 25,000, but when an effort was made to give more precision to the term and to confine it to persons making at least a substantial part of their living from farming the number shrank to 16,627. On this basis, four reservations made a slight increase in their numbers, twenty-eight made no change, and thirty-eight showed very considerable shrinkage. Some reduced the number previously reported by as much as from 25 to 50 per cent. Obviously, as agriculture is the chief economic opportunity for many Indians, statistics as to their progress as farmers are vitally important to the Service in directing and controlling its activities for the promotion