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Charon, Joel M., and Lee Vigilant. 2008. The Meaning of Sociology: A Reader. 9th ed. Prentice Hall.

Rating:
6

Review:
comprehensive reader

I used this as a supplement to the John J. Macionis 9th edition Introduction to Sociology text. To be completely honest I’m not sure that given similar circumstances I would use them both again. The reason being that I taught a very condensed course (17 days of class, 13 actual lectures/discussion). Because the class was so condensed I didn’t feel that I could assign the students any more reading than a chapter from the Macionis text and a reading from this reader everyday. Given a more drawn out course, say the traditional 10-week quarter, I can see where this reader would be more useful because you could assign multiple readings to each corresponding chapter in the introductory text and actually cover more than 13 of the 65 readings in the book. Because I only covered about 13 of them I don’t think I’ll use this text in this format again (too expensive for 13 readings), opting instead to create a small packet of 10 articles or something along those lines.

As for the reader itself, I would say that about half of the included readings were superb and the other half ranged between mediocre and pretty poor. For instance, most of the readings by Peter Berger (not Berger and Luckmann) were very clear, articulate, and downright humorous for a sociologist to read; I’m not sure my class found them as humorous, but they did seem to enjoy them.

I also found in discussing the articles with my class that the articles that were most well-received, despite some students not agreeing with the methods or conclusions of the articles, were the articles that applied sociological understanding to real-world problems, for example the reading ‘Fraternities and Rape on Campus’ by Martin and Hummer resulted in a very lively and heated discussion.

I can understand that Charon is trying to incorporate some more traditional readings in the reader in order to give the students a sense of what some classical sociological writing is like and also to give them an opportunity to read classical sociology. It seems like a noble goal, but I’m not sure how effective it is. Most of the excerpts he included were typically so short that they didn’t really cover enough to get a good understanding of what the author was trying to get at (the exception being ‘Human Nature’ by Cooley). For example, the excerpt by Berger and Luckmann on socialization was just a snippet from their wordy but fascinating treatise ‘The Social Construction of Reality’ and by no means gave an accurate or comprehensive understanding of what it was Berger and Luckmann were getting at. Of course, my introduction to that text was actually an entire course focused on reading just that one book, so I’m kind of surprised that Charon would think a snippet would actually be useful to undergraduate students.

Overall I think the reader is designed to appeal to a broad array of sociology instructors by offering a little bit of everything (theory, application, critical sociology, etc.) but in so doing it becomes the task of the instructor to wade through the articles to find the ones that work for him/her. I’m not sure there is another way to do it when trying to appeal to a large and varied group of instructors, so it can’t really be honed in that sense. Nevertheless, the reader does contain a number of classical works (e.g. ‘The Saints and the Roughnecks’ among others) that are both engaging and interesting to undergraduate students and work well as supplements to an introductory text.

Ritchey, Ferris Joseph. 2008. The Statistical Imagination: Elementary Statistics for the Social Sciences. 2nd ed. Boston: McGraw Hill.

Rating:
10

Summary:
This is an introductory statistics textbook for sociology students. Perhaps uniquely, rather than begin straightaway with statistical calculations, this text begins with the theory underlying statistical analysis. In fact, a full third of the text is made up of statistical theory and basic explanations of statistical concepts.

The statistical calculations covered in the text range from basic t-tests to ordinary least squares regression (single IV variable). Each statistical test includes lengthy explanations along with an example calculation. In addition to the explanations, the book has questions and exercises at the end of each chapter as it is, of course, an introductory textbook for college students.

Review:
This is by far the clearest explanation of statistical theory (probability testing) that I have read. I would highly recommend it for basic statistical courses. It presents the tests and theory well enough that this could even work for an introductory statistical text for high school students.

There are two minor problems with the text. First, I wish it covered multiple regression in addition to single independent variable regression as the explanations in this text are very clear and I can only assume that it would help clarify the topic for those who must perform these tests (which are becoming increasingly common). Second, it is often the case that the author begins a chapter with one example then switches to another example for the second half of the chapter. While I can understand the utility in such an approach (it provides multiple examples for a single type of statistical analysis), it occasionally becomes confusing. Other than these two remarkably minor problems, the text is superb.

Two features of this book really stand out. First, the book specifically lays out when you should use a particular test. This element of the book is worth the price alone. The second element that stands out is the tone the author takes; a tone that has two elements: First, he is funny and tries his best to integrate wit and humor into a statistical text (like admitting to having been struck by lightning; p. 269). The second tone is a positive view of scientific skepticism that pervades the entire text. The author clearly lays out the value of skeptical thinking (see p. 16).

Overall, I highly recommend this text for introductory statistics courses. It is easy to understand yet does not simplify the concepts and analysis. Perhaps there are other introductory texts that do as good of a job, but I have yet to see one that comes close.