State of the Community Report (SOCR)
The difference between SOCRs and SOERs is that SOCRs focus on social and economic factors, human health and other elements of the human environment for their own sake, not just as they relate to the biophysical environment. However, recent trends in SOE reporting have seen an expansion in scope, such that the distinction between SOERs and SOCRs is becoming blurred.

Types of SOCRs: (in practice, there seem to be no defined criteria by which SOCRs are categorized, but in theory, they should have the following characteristics)

Quality of Life Report (QOL)
QOL studies are designed to measure an individual's happiness and satisfaction with life and his environment, including needs and desires, aspirations, life-style preferences and other tangible and intangible factors that determine overall well-being. Hence, QOL reports have a comprehensive scope, but do not emphasize the linkages among different components of the environment.

State of the City Report
State of the City reports focus on the quality of the social, physical and economic environments in a community or city. Emphasis is placed on linkages among the social, physical, economic and human health components. They are similar to SOERs in that they address the state of the biophysical environment and how it affects, or is affected by human activity. They differ from SOERs in that they discuss social, economic and human health factors, not only as they relate to the biophysical environment but also as they relate to each other.

Indicator
An Indicator is a single quantity derived from one, or an aggregation of several, environmental or socioeconomic variable(s). Indicators are used to show environmentally significant trends, to reflect a gain or loss in human welfare from a change in a condition of the environment, or to provide a representative measure of the effect of an environmental stress, or a policy response. A comprehensive set of indicators should include measures of stressors associated with human activities and natural events, conditions of the biophysical and human environment, as well as management responses.

Target
Indicators often include reference points or targets. Appropriate reference points for municipal indicators include provincial/ national means, policy targets, regulations, time trends, intra-community comparisons (i.e. differences in transportation modal split between neighbourhoods) and inter-community comparisons (i.e., ratio of tree plantings to removals in one community compared to levels in another community). Regulatory targets compare indicator levels to a provincial or national standard. Proactive targets are set by the community itself as a goal to reach within a certain time frame.

Organizational Frameworks:

• Issues Framework
  Focuses on specific environmental issues or controversies such as global warming. Advantages of this framework is that it tends to be more readable, it can highlight important problems or long term trends, and can command attention for environmental issues and generate public support for an issue. The disadvantages are that it does not present a comprehensive coverage of the state of the environment and often does not emphasize the linkages that can exist among different issues.
• Resource Sector Framework
  Focuses on the conditions and trends found in the resource sectors such as forestry, mining, energy and agriculture. The emphasis is on human use of the environment, and thus data are often readily available since government agencies routinely collect information on trends in production and consumption in the resource sectors. However, this framework tends to overlook complex ecosystem processes and consequently may provide a narrow and incomplete reflection of the state of the environment.
• Environmental media Framework
  Describes the condition or state of environmental media such as air, water, land, flora and fauna. Data for this type of framework are usually readily available from government agencies. A disadvantage of this framework is that it compartmentalizes the environment and is weak in its analysis of cross-media or ecosystem effects.
• Environmental Process Framework (condition-stress-response)
  Uses an ecosystem approach that recognizes the response of the environment to human induced stresses, and looks at dynamic relationships that illustrate the cause and effect nature of environmental conditions. Advantages of this framework are that it is cross-sectoral and views humans as part of environmental conditions and trends. It also facilitates the development and evaluation of management responses to environmental problems. A problem with the framework is that our understanding of the dynamics of complex environmental processes may be incomplete, making it difficult to apply the framework.

Spatial Frameworks:

• Jurisdictional Framework
  Relies on political or administrative boundaries such as town lines or census tract boundaries to define the limits of the data collection. An advantage of this framework is that it helps the average reader to relate to issues presented in the report, and data is readily available at this level. However, jurisdictional frameworks tend to overlook naturally occurring patterns such as watersheds or ecozones and therefore will fail to capture all of the linkages that can occur within an ecosystem.
• Environmental Component framework
  Recognizes naturally occurring patterns in the environment such as soil type, vegetation zones and drainage basins as boundaries for the SOER. A problem with this framework is that it may be difficult to cross-reference or relate data from one environmental component, such as a watershed, to data in another environmental component, such as a forest. Furthermore, it may be difficult to aggregate data to this level.
• Ecosystem framework
  Relies on geographic units that contain distinctive sets of abiotic and biotic features. For example, the "ecozone" spatial units used in Canada's national SOERs are large, terrestrial ecosystem units that contain ecologically related living and non-living resources. This framework is particularly appropriate for integrating or displaying environmentally related data and demonstrating interrelationships among environmental media.

Process
The shape and orientation of a SOER or SOCR is guided by the selection of its objectives, an appropriate framework, the indicators and the target audience for the report. For reports produced by municipal governments, these choices may be the responsibility of an intradepartmental committee, an interdepartmental committee, a multisectoral committee, or a community based committee. The advantage of limiting responsibility for such decisions to one or more government departments is that the report can be prepared fairly quickly without the need to go through a lengthy process of reaching consensus on all aspects. The advantage of using a multisectoral or community based committee is that the greater the number of groups responsible for the preparation of the report, the broader the base of support for such a document is likely to be.