This book's logical organization—essential concepts, troubled institutions, inequality, deviance, and global problems—in a concise, paperback format, helps readers gain a coherent understanding of social problems. There are strongly worded debates in each chapter on controversial problems related to the family, the political economy, education, the poor, ethnic minorities, health and illness, drug use, and crime. "Personal Perspectives" boxes give first person accounts of experiences such as single motherhood and "Signs of Hope" boxes show progress and solutions to problems. For those interested in a comprehensive look at—and a global perspective of—the social problems of America and other countries, as well as their causes and attempted solutions. This book's logical organization—essential concepts, troubled institutions, inequality, deviance, and global problems—in a concise, paperback format, helps readers gain a coherent understanding of social problems. There are strongly worded debates in each chapter on controversial problems related to the family, the political economy, education, the poor, ethnic minorities, health and illness, drug use, and crime. "Personal Perspectives" boxes give first person accounts of experiences such as single motherhood and "Signs of Hope" boxes show progress and solutions to problems. For those interested in a comprehensive look at—and a global perspective of—the social problems of America and other countries, as well as their causes and attempted solutions. Like its longer sibling, this book was written for students. Its objective is not only to familiarize undergraduates with the most trying problems of their times, but also to stimulate them to think in a critical, scientific way. It tries to challenge the half-truths and pat answers that many people accept simply because they have heard them repeated so often, and to get students to participate in the dialogue about these issues rather than merely stand back and observe. This brief introduction to social problems is based on the eighth edition of the Social Problems text we authored with the assistance of Linda L. Ramos. It may seem like a relatively simple task to cut an eighteen chapter book down into twelve, but it proved to be a real challenge. Of course, we could have just eliminated six chapters and updated the rest, but that would have produced a poorly organized book with significant holes in its coverage. So the original challenge was to combine material in ways that would allow coverage of all the key points in less space. But as the work progressed, we realized that the demands of this new format encouraged us to make new connections between problems in ways that should, we hope, provide valuable new insights to students. For example, Chapter 2 in the brief edition combines the chapters on political and economic problems into a single chapter that we think does a better job of laying out the fundamental framework of our political economy. Much of the material in the main text's chapter on sexual behavior is included in the chapters on gender and family, and the discussion of warfare and international conflict is now integrated into the chapter on global inequality, which clearly lays out the inevitable linkage between these two problems in a way that has become particularly useful in light of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Population and the environment are covered in a single new chapter that makes the effects of the population explosion on our environmental crisis even clearer. We have tried to continue all the features that have helped make the main text so successful—the strongly worded debates on controversial issues, informative graphics, a consistent theoretical organizational that includes a section on the major theoretical perspectives in each chapter, and a clear, straightforward style of writing that does not talk down to the reader or oversimplify complex issues. Also continued are the "Lessons from Other Places" boxes that use the experiences of other nations to shed light on the social problems we fate in North America. Although this brief edition is based on the main text, which only came out a year before, social problems is a rapidly changing field of study, and each chapter also had to be thoroughly updated and revised. We should also make it clear that while the length of coverage of the various problems differs from the main text, no major topics have been omitted. All in all, we are extremely pleased with the way this brief edition came out, and we hope the readers will feel the same way. SUPPLEMENTS FOR THE INSTRUCTOR Instructor's Manual with Tests. This essential instructor's tool includes detailed chapter outlines, teaching objectives, discussion questions, classroom activities, and additional instructor's resources. Also included are multiple-choice, true/false, and essay questions keyed to the text. Prentice Hall Test Manager. This computerized software allo