A Critical Review of Family Sociology Textbooks

In 1986 we published a review of 13 marriage and family textbooks in an attempt to help instructors select high-quality texts that suit their courses and students (Greenwood and Cassidy 1986). We also wanted to demonstrate to the publishing industry that we are an educated clientele who require a superior product. In this tradition, our present purpose is to review critically texts that are available for use in upper-division family sociology courses. We hope that such a review will communicate to the publishing industry our pedagogical and scholastic concers as educated consumers. Our review is unique in that we attempt to review systematically and comparatively all of the texts that we found available within a three-year publication period. Although reviews of single textbooks are useful, we aim to increase that utility by providing comparisons among seven upper-level family textbooks. In doing so, we can draw conclusions about the texts available in this area and can provide instructors with more information with which to make informed choices. We have chosen the publication period from 1988 through 1990. Textbooks that were published in 1988 were written in 1986 or earlier (if we assume that the editorial and production processes take about two years on the average). Texts written earlier than 1988 do not contain