This document presents information gathered by the Massachusetts Committee for Children and Youth as it developed and tested various approaches for assessing the health and social needs of children under 6 years of age. The first section of the document is a summary of findings and general recommendations for action by the U.S. Office of Child Development. The second section presents the goals of the project and the model developed to assess children's needs. Section Three is a profile of the study area in Boston, Massachusetts. Section Four presents case studies of the three sub-areas of the study area in which various approaches of the model were applied for data collection. The appendix, comprising nearly half the document, includes a series of computer maps of the study area which represent a new method for presenting human service data. (MS)