The author suggests that the emerging fields of social practice (such as recreation, social work, and adult education) must all go through a sequential pattern of research needs, first superficially, and then in ever deeper cycles. The six phases of these research needs are: definition of the field (survey and descriptive studies, census studies, case reports, demographic studies); differentiation of the field (comparative and exploratory studies, reports of artistic experience, need analysis); standard-setting (normative-descriptive studies, evaluative research, instrumental studies); technological refinement (experimental research, case studies, theory-building, action research); respectability and justification (historical studies, biographical research, field-evaluative and survey-descriptive studies, comparative studies); and understanding of the dynamics of the field (institutional studies, environmental studies, force-field analysis, systems analysis, and prediction studies). (MF)