Public & Private Families: An Introduction

I am extremely satisfied with my purchase. By textbook arrive within a week of ordering it and in great condition. The description of the textbook was accurate, it was used and had some highlighted text but the price I paid was considerably cheaper than that of my campus book. Bottom line, Great buy!

Came very fast, way before it was due to be. In great condition as promised. Thank you soooo much!

I am a Sociology professor in a distance learning university. I have selected this text (fifth edition) to use in my class in Sociology of the Family . This is an excellent textbook and is supported by a great deal of research. The material is written in an interesting manner for students with many photographs and statistics. However, while this is a text of 2006, I find a critical weakness - in that the topic of kinship is sketchily addressed by the author and then within the section of Social Class .The Billingsley theory of Kinship legitimizes genealogy as a whole field of inquiry in higher education and the conclusions drawn from the study of the power of kinship should most certainly be addressed in this textbook of the Sociology of the Family. Dr. Carolyn Billingsley's research and theoretical framework of kinship in her book, Communities of Kinship, Antebellum Families and the Settlement of the Cotton Frontier of 2004, shows howThomas Keesee Sr. 's many descendants through time and the power of kinship controlled and shaped migration and settlement patterns of the south in religion, economics and political power. Billingsley makes an excellent case for kinship as a distinct category of analysis similar to race, class and gender. I would hope to see this important current research and exciting theory which is a breakthrough in genealogy, addressed in the next edition of Cherlin's Sociology of the Family textbook.

I am a Sociology and Psychology double major taking a Bachelor's level Marriage and Family sociology class, and I think this book is great! Many textbooks, even in sociology(!), can be dull, but I am finding this book to be a very good read. Very informative and thought-provoking. Statistics in the forms of graphs and tables are also helpful. I also think viewing the family as having a "public" and "private" dimension is valuable and relevant. It's also well-organized and seems to cover all the bases. In response to the previous review, I don't find the material difficult. There's a brief summary in the form of bullet points at the end of every section and every chapter! Doesn't get much more straight-forward than that. I also tend to sell back my books, but I think I will keep this one as a resource. No complaints really, I will think about it over the course of the semester.

This review is from the perspective of a sociology instructor and refers to the 4th edition of the textbook and reader. I've used this pair of texts twice in a Sociology of Family course at a medium-size, medium-quality regional university. The textbook is the most accurate, complete, well-organized, and sociological of the many family textbooks I've reviewed. However, I don't plan to use it again. It is too challenging for my students. Cherlin assumes a basic knowledge of sociological concepts and social facts that my students don't have. They become confused and frustrated when reading. There is a good website associated with the textbook that gives students study help, but I can't use the instructor version because of bad publisher customer service (tech support and my publisher's rep have been passing the buck about who should help me for the past month). I'd recommend this book if your students have the basics in place before the course starts. I plan to look for something written for students who don't. UPDATE Spring Semester 2010: I am still using this text and reader, now the 6th editions, and providing more basic-sociology and explaining-Cherlin's-points during lecture. I have found that weekly multiple-choice quizzes help students understand the material as we move through it. The website is now good, including a good testbank. Updates to the books with new editions actually add to and improve the content--if you have been teaching a while, you know that this is not the case with every book and every publisher. I teach this course on an irregular basis, but I think I will return to this pair of books in the future. Getting students to read the books and refer to them when writing exams and papers is an ongoing challenge, but that's hardly unique to this book or course. WARNING: The test banks for the 6th edition of the book can not be trusted. Several questions and answers are repeated from earlier test banks, with page references for the new textbook, but in some cases, recent research makes a previously correct answer incorrect. The test questions and answers themselves have not been thoroughly edited for accuracy given research presented in the new edition. Result: upset students, complaints, ugh.