The human life course is filled with and subject to a wide range of personal difficulties, many of which are shared by others. Life events and processes such as birth, childhood, training for and entering an occupation, marriage, and procreation, growing older, death and dying are all subject to dilemmas, obstacles, and barriers. Social Problems across the Life Course offers accessible readings that examine the societal construction of social problems out of the personal troubles that peop...

Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are b...

Education in the responsible conduct of research typically takes the form of online instructions about rules, regulations, and policies. Research Ethics takes a novel approach and emphasizes the art of philosophical decision-making. Part A introduces egoism and explains that it is in the individual's own interest to avoid misconduct, fabrication of data, plagiarism and bias. Part B explains contractualism and covers issues of authorship, peer review and responsible use of statistics. Part ...

How the science of unselfish behavior can promote law, order, and prosperityContemporary law and public policy often treat human beings as selfish creatures who respond only to punishments and rewards. Yet every day we behave unselfishly—few of us mug the elderly or steal the paper from our neighbor's yard, and many of us go out of our way to help strangers. We nevertheless overlook our own good behavior and fixate on the bad things people do and how we can stop th...

When we talk about family values, like whether children need two parents, we are also talking about gender values, because a "yes" answer to this question might imply that only women with husbands should have children. In the same way, when we talk about gender issues, such as whether men should be paid higher wages than women, we are also talking about family issues, because a "yes" answer suggests that husbands should be the family breadwinner. In this...

In Violence Against Women, award-winning author Walter S. DeKeseredy offers a passionate but well-documented sociological overview of a sobering problem. He starts by outlining the scope of the challenge and debunks current attempts to label intimate violence as gender neutral. He then lays bare the structural practices that sustain this violence, leading to a discussion of long- and short-term policies to address the issue. DeKeseredy includes an examination of male complicity an...

Crime, Shame and Reintegration is a contribution to general criminological theory. Its approach is as relevant to professional burglary as to episodic delinquency or white collar crime. Braithwaite argues that some societies have higher crime rates than others because of their different processes of shaming wrongdoing. Shaming can be counterproductive, making crime problems worse. But when shaming is done within a cultural context of respect for the offender, it can be an extraordinarily p...

Over half of all births to young adults in the United States now occur outside of marriage, and many are unplanned. The result is increased poverty and inequality for children. The left argues for more social support for unmarried parents; the right argues for a return to traditional marriage.In Generation Unbound, Isabel V. Sawhill offers a third approach: change ""drifters"" into ""planners."" In a well-written and accessible survey of the impact of family structure on ch...

In this solidly researched book, the authors demonstrate that the knowledge and techniques exist to decrease the incidence of welfare dependency, poor single-parent families and alienated, uneducated youth. In addition to providing a detailed account of the problem, they describe twenty-four programs that have proved successful in changing the lives of seriously disadvantaged children.

Gendering Bodies explains how the social world shapes our physical bodies and how our bodies shape the social world. In this remarkable investigation into contemporary ideas of gender, sociologists Crawley, Foley, and Shehan argue that bodies are constantly being gendered, or encouraged to participate in (heterosexual) gender conformity. This engendering influences nutrition practices, work and employment choices, dieting, working out, cosmetic surgery, sexual practices, and train...

In today's world, it is more acceptable to be depressed than to be lonely-yet loneliness appears to be the inevitable byproduct of our frenetic contemporary lifestyle. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, one out of four Americans talked to no one about something of importance to them during the last six months. Another remarkable fact emerged from the 2000 U.S. Census: more people are living alone today than at any point in the country's history—fully 25 percent of households cons...

This volume of original chapters is designed to bring attention to a neglected area of feminist scholarship - aging. After several decades of feminist studies we are now well informed of the complex ways that gender shapes the lives of women and men. Similarly, we know more about how gendered power relations interface with race and ethnicity, class and sexual orientation. Serious theorizing of old age and age relations to gender represents the next frontier of feminist scholarship. In this...