This page contains a brief overview of ISA's history. For a more detailed history of ISA's first thirty years, see The Institute for Scientific Analysis 1968 - 1998.

In 1966, sociologist Dorothy Lonewolf Miller left the California State Department of Mental Hygiene to establish the nonprofit mental health research group, Social Psychiatry Research Associates. Recognizing the need for a organization with a broader focus than the specific social problems of the mentally ill, Miller launched Scientific Analysis Corporation (SAC) in 1968 as a nonprofit social science research corporation dedicated to the "betterment of the human condition."

As SAC's research division, the Institute for Scientific Analysis (ISA) emerged as an administrative alternative to university and government bureaucracies through which independent researchers could investigate the major policy issues affecting our society. Since its founding, ISA has sponsored more than eighty research projects contributing to policy debates in a broad range of social issues including poverty, social welfare, education, crime and delinquency, mental health, race and ethnicity, gender, child development, aging, violence, AIDS, and substance abuse.

After Guiding ISA for more than thirty years, Dorothy Lonewolf Miller retired as Director in July of 1999.  Today, under the directorship of Michael H. Jang, ISA continues to foster a collegial and creative environment for social scientists seeking to use research as a tool for social change.