Current research on local siting conflicts are primarily about environmental threats. Following a boom during the two last decades of the 1900s, research on community opposition to the establishment of human services is a shrinking field with inadequate articulation and comparisons of various approaches. The aim of this research review is to critically scrutinize the first wave of research on local protests against human services and expose and contrast later approaches in order to lay the necessary groundwork for synthesis attempts. The first wave approach is characterized by its far-reaching generalization claims; all local protests against perceived social threats were seen as instances of Not In My Back Yard protests and as a function of general, hierarchically arranged attitudes toward client groups. By contrast, in later attempts to shed light upon neighbourhood protests, real life protests against the establishment of human services – not general attitudinal data – are focused upon. But the degree of contextualizing varies greatly within this more protest-centred research. The indirect approach is based on data that are collected in interviews with human service administrators and concern the extent and duration of neighbors’ protests, while in the direct approach the protests are studied as such, and especially issues having to do with the local protests’ ability to generate public support. In this article, the alternatives to the first wave of research on siting conflicts have been demonstrated for the first time and contrasted with each other. This is a necessary requirement and a first step for efforts to provide the syntheses that this research area so sorely needs.