Freeman, Howard E.

(b. 1929, New York City; d. 1992, in flight between Washington, DC, and Los Angeles). Ph.D., M.A. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, New York University; B.A. New York University.

Freeman began his career as Assistant Social Scientist at the RAND Corporation, followed by a position at the Harvard School of Public Health (1956–1962). He became the Morse Professor of Urban Studies at Brandeis University, where he served for 12 years. Freeman was Social Science Advisor for Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean for the Ford Foundation in Mexico City from 1972 to 1974.

Later, during his tenure at UCLA, he was Professor and Chair of Sociology, Director of the Institute for Social Science Research, and a contributing faculty member in several UCLA departments. Freeman was also Senior Research Advisor to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a consultant to the RAND Corporation, and a member of the Institute of [Page 165]Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. He was a consultant on evaluation and research to many foundations and organizations, including the National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, American Academy of Sciences, MacArthur Foundation, the National Institutes of Mental Health, the National Center for Health Services Research, and the Japan Academy for Health Behavioral Science.

Freeman was one of the first to delineate medical sociology as a field in sociology. He and Ozzie Simmons received the Hofheimer Prize from the American Psychiatric Association for the best book on behavior from 1960 to 1963 for The Mental Patient Comes Home. In 1991, Freeman received the Myrdal Award for Evaluation Practice from the American Evaluation Association. Freeman wrote and edited many books on evaluation research. He also was the coeditor of several evaluation research journals.

His interest in the social sciences allowed him to elevate evaluation research to a more rigorous and scientific endeavor. His textbook, well known in the field of evaluation, Evaluation: A Systematic Approach, coauthored with Peter Rossi and others, is widely used today. In fact, Freeman passed away on the airplane after finishing one of the editions of the book. He had authored more than 100 books and articles.