Product Description: Who Believes in the Paranormal, and Why?Angels, ESP, psychics, astrology, ghosts, communicating with the dead, UFOs: These and other astounding phenomena are accepted as valid by a substantial proportion of the public. Why do so many members of our scientifically sophisticated society believe in assertions that scientists roundly and almost unanimously reject? And what does expressing such beliefs mean for the lives of those who do?Unlike many books on the paranormal, which are focused on debunking or verifying such beliefs, in this book sociologist Erich Goode is interested in explaining paranormal belief as a sociological phenomenon: Who believes, why, and what are the consequences?Goode points out a number of interesting sociological features of paranormal belief...read more

Product Description: Drugs in American Society is a sociological introduction to the use of psychoactive substances in the United States that takes the focus of attention on drug use out of the lab and into the street. Throughout the book, personal accounts tell the stories of drug use and the impact that it has on the lives of users...read more

Product Description: This widely-adopted text seeks to understand deviance from the key sociological perspectives and theories. Real-world examples of deviance are provided throughout to encourage critical thinking about deviant behavior and its impact.

Product Description: Marijuana seeks to bring to the reader the whole configuration of this problem, which, like the Sexual Revolution and the New Politics, was at the heart of the alienation felt by many young people during the second half of the 1960s and the fears of social breakdown voiced by many of their elders...read more

Product Description: MySearchLab provides students with a complete understanding of the research process so they can complete research projects confidently and efficiently. Students and instructors with an internet connection can visit www.MySearchLab...read more

Product Description: Out of Control promises to be a key supplemental textbook in criminology and sociology courses, both at the undergraduate and graduate level. Providing an indispensable overview of Gottfredson and Hirschi's influential self-control theory, this fundamental text evaluates whether the theory truly helps us to understand the facts of crime...read more

Product Description: Most primary deviation is of transitory significance and involves a fairly insignificant punishment. Extreme Deviance focuses on behavior, beliefs, and traits that are so serious as to generate, in the words of Edwin Lemert, secondary deviation...read more

Product Description: Deviance is a reality in all of our lives. In the author's words, it "is both an analytic sociological concept and a lived experience, both a label that is applied and an emotional reality that is sustained." This book looks at deviance as it is lived...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Despite the continued and growing popularity of such phenom- ena as angels, witches, extra-sensory perception, psychics, astrology, foretelling the future, living past lives, ghosts, and communicating with the dead, such beliefs have received little scrutiny from sociologists...read more

Product Description: In this book Erich Goode gives an overview of drug use and abuse in America to give students a solid understanding of the issues and problems. Key arguments in the drug legalization debate are placed in a social and political perspective, with implications for current debates beyond the US...read more

Product Description: SOCIAL DEVIANCE offers a collection of readings which span the topic of deviance from a variety of sources, including professional journals newspapers and magazines, books, and unpublished material, including first-hand accounts by deviance-enactors, victims of deviance, agents of social control, etc...read more

Product Description: Packed with new examples and material, this second edition provides a fully up-to-date exploration of the genesis, dynamics, and demise of moral panics and their impacts on the societies in which they take place. Packed with updated and recent examples including terrorism, the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Towers, school shootings, flag burning, and the early-2000s resurgence of the “sex slave” scareIncludes a new chapter on the media, currently regarded as a major component of the moral panicDevotes a chapter to addressing criticisms of the first edition as well as the moral panics concept itselfWritten by long-established experts in the fieldDesigned to fit both self-contained courses on moral panics and wider courses on devianc...read more

Product Description: A contemporary, full-color, introduction to sociology.