Psychology - Theory, History & Research, Social Problems

Thinking about Social Problems: An Introduction to Constructionist Perspectives

Name: Thinking about Social Problems: An Introduction to Constructionist Perspectives
Author: Donileen R. Loseke
ISBN: 9780202306209

by Donileen R. Loseke

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Overview

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 the Author:
Donileen R. Loseke is Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology, University fo South Florida. A past-president of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, Dr. Loseke is author of The Battered Women and Shelters: The Social Construction of Wife Abuse, and coeditor (with Richard Gelles) of Current Controverersies on Family Violence. Dr. Ellis serves also as coeditor of The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and as an advisory editor to Social Problems, a journal.

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Editorials

Lawrence T. Nichols

[E]ngagingly well written in a personal, unpretentious style, and well informed by the author's knowledge of the professional literature.
— Contemporary Sociology

Mitch Berbrier

[E]xtraordinarily lucid writing by an active researcher who clearly has a masterful grasp on this perspective.
— Canadian Journal of Sociology Online

Booknews

A textbook introducing the approach to undergraduates early in their study of such subjects as social problems, sociology, family violence, and women's lives; most students are not exposed to it until the advanced undergraduate or even graduate levels. For readers who know little about social constructivism and will not necessary embrace it, explains the notion that people create, that is construct, problems, as opposed to the conventional idea that problems are objective realities that people encounter. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)