This is a comprehensive mid-level paperback text that takes a theoretically
balanced, student-centered approach to social problems. The text progresses from
a micro- to macro-level of analysis, focusing first on such problems as illness
and health care, drugs and alcohol, and family problems and then broadening to
the larger issues of poverty and inequality, population growth, environmental
problems, and conflict around the world. The social problem in each chapter is
framed in a global as well as U.S. context. In every chapter, the three major
theoretical perspectives are applied to the social problem under discussion, and
the consequences of the problem, as well as alternative solutions, are