Thinking About Social Problems: An Introduction to Constructionist Perspectives (Social Problems and Social Issues) - Softcover

Loseke, Donileen R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0202306208 ISBN 13: 9780202306209

Publisher: Aldine De Gruyter, 1999

Synopsis

While many scholars in sociology, communication, media studies, public policy, psychotherapy, and criminology use social construction perspectives in their own research, these perspectives tend not to be adequately covered in popular college-level texts. This book can bring constructionist perspectives into college classrooms because it offers an accessible overview of these perspectives that is interdisciplinary in scope and historically current in examples. The topics cover a broad range of issues including how successful images of social problem conditions, victims, and villains are constructed; how these images shape public policy and social services; and how these images can change the ways we make sense of ourselves and others. In focusing on what constructionist examination tells readers about their own lives, this book encourages critical reasoning skills; it encourages readers to become thoughtful and knowledgeable consumers of all talk about social problems and to think about the individual, social, and political consequences of the process of constructing public worry.

About this title

About the Author

Donileen R. Loseke is professor of sociology at the University of South Florida. A past president of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, she is the author of The Battered Woman and Shelters: The Social Construction of Wife Abuse, and coeditor (with Richard Gelles) of Current Controversies on Family Violence.

Review

“Readers will find this book engagingly well written in a personal, unpretentious style, and well informed by the author’s knowledge of the professional literature.”

—Lawrence T. Nichols, Contemporary Sociology

Edition details

• Publisher: Aldine De Gruyter
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0202306208
• ISBN 13: 9780202306209
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 227