This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The past 200 years have witnessed revolutionary changes in living conditions for most people in the Global North. While the broad outline of these processes is well known through extensive research at the macro level, we still know very little about their micro-level...

There is a clear trend in rich countries that, despite rising incomes and living standards, the gap between rich and poor is widening. What does this mean for our health? Does increasing income inequality affect outcomes such as obesity, life expectancy and subjective well-being? Are rich and poor groups affected in the same ways? This book reviews the latest research on the relationship between inequality and health, and provides a pedagogical introduction to the tools and knowledge neede...

In At Risk, Karen J. Swift and Marilyn Callahan examine risk and risk assessment in the context of professional practice in child protection, social work, and other human services. They argue that the tools, technologies, and practices used to measure risk to the individual have gone unquestioned and unstudied and that current methods of risk assessment may be distorting the principles of social justice.Central to this study is an examination of the everyday experiences of...

A leading economist discusses the potential of happiness research (the quantification of well-being) to answer important questions that standard economics methods are unable to analyze.Revolutionary developments in economics are rare. The conservative bias of the field and its enshrined knowledge make it difficult to introduce new ideas not in line with received theory. Happiness research, however, has the potential to change economics substantially in the future. ...

In bioethics, discussions of justice have tended to focus on questions of fairness in access to health care: is there a right to medical treatment, and how should priorities be set when medical resources are scarce. But health care is only one of many factors that determine the extent to which people live healthy lives, and fairness is not the only consideration in determining whether a health policy is just. In this pathbreaking book, senior bioethicists Powers and Faden confront foundati...

Manski argues that public policy is based on untrustworthy analysis. Failing to account for uncertainty in an uncertain world, policy analysis routinely misleads policy makers with expressions of certitude. Manski critiques the status quo and offers an innovation to improve both how policy research is conducted and how it is used by policy makers.

This book brings together the best of current global research on the measurement and understanding of international differences in well-being

There are fewer people living in extreme poverty in the world today than 30 years ago. While that is an achievement, continuing progress for poor people is far from assured. Inequalities in access to key resources threaten to stall growth and poverty reduction in many places. The world's poorest have made only a small absolute gain over those 30 years. Progress has been slow against relative poverty as judged by the standards of the country and time one lives in, and a great many people in...

The Feeling of Risk brings together the work of Paul Slovic, one of the world's leading analysts of risk, to describe the extension of risk perception research into the first decade of this new century.In this collection of important works, Paul Slovic explores the conception of 'risk as feelings' and examines the interaction of feeling and cognition in the perception of risk. He also examines the elements of knowledge, cognitive skill, and communication necessary for good decision...

In recent years, social scientists have engaged in a deep debate over the methods appropriate to their research. Their long reliance on passive observational collection of information has been challenged by proponents of experimental methods designed to precisely infer causal effects through active intervention in the social world. Some scholars claim that field experiments represent a new gold standard and the best way forward, while others insist that these methods carry inherent inconsi...

Are socioeconomic inequalities in education declining? Is socioeconomic background becoming less important for people’s occupational class or status? How important is cognitive ability for education and later occupational outcomes? How do countries differ in the importance of socioeconomic background for education and work?Gary N. Marks argues that in western industrialized countries, pervasive views that socioeconomic background (or class background) has strong an...

Violence Against Women: Vulnerable Populations investigates under-researched and underserved groups of women who are particularly vulnerable to violent victimization from an intimate male partner. In the past, there has been an understandable reluctance to address this issue to avoid stereotyping vulnerable groups of women. However, developments in the field, particularly intersectionality theory, which recognizes women’s diversity in experiences of violence, suggest that the time...