Human Development

This isn’t really a textbook. It’s a casserole of abused statistics and political opinions. The authors are in love with numbers. Gobs of statistics are smeared over many pages of this book. The only problem is that, while the authors are really good are throwing numbers around, they’re really bad at, or incapable of, interpreting those numbers. It seemed to me that they knew their presentation of statistics was incoherent; unfortunately, that leaves the reader with bunches of numbers and percentages and surveys that are basically presented in a vacuum.

This book does a better job than other social science texts I’ve read of at least making a show of adhering to scientific method. Although there are lots of fuzzy logic and infuriating inductive generalizations going on here, the authors do occasionally pen a coherent sentence. It’s just that a lot of their work seems to hinge on the assumption that their audience isn’t made up of critical thinkers, but is composed of fellow stuffed-shirts who want to jail human beings in an nauseating human ant farm for easy study. Anybody who doesn’t necessarily think Piaget and Erikson are infallible is going to have difficulty swallowing some of the authors’s presumptions. If you were the person sitting in Sociology 101 rolling your eyes at terms like “structural functionalist,” this textbook will have you gagging.

Like other social science textbooks to which I have been subjected, the authors seem unable to speak of minorities without affecting a irritatingly paternal tone. If you had only this book on which to base your opinion of, say, African-Americans, you would think that a great lot of them are feebs, unable to master their lives and take control of their own destinies. Such is one of the many unintended consequences of breathless politically correct psychobabble mated with oodles of statistics. Don’t believe me? Read the book.

Political opinions are presented as fact. For example, in chapter 11, the opinion that strict gun-control laws will reduce the number of teen suicides in the United States is presented as fact. Not only is the conclusion a non-sequitur presented without significant corroborating evidence, if it were right (which it’s not), it’d only be half right: “…in 2004, hanging/suffocation was the most common method of suicide among girls, accounting for 71.4 percent of suicides among 10- to-14-year-old girls and 49 percent among 15-to-19 year-old girls. From 2003 to 2004, there was a 119 percent increase in hanging/suffocation suicides among 10-to -14-year-old girls. For boys and young men, firearms are still the most common method.”* The authors might have known this if they had cared to draw their information from a study that had been conducted more recently than 1993. This is inexcusably sloppy research, not to mention insufferable opinion-spinning. Using the bully pulpit of a textbook to advance opinions about 2nd Amendment rights is absurd.

Finally, for those of us (like me) for whom social sciences are the urine stain on the otherwise pristine tighty-whities of actual science, there really isn’t much here. Yes, teenage girls get depressed. Yes, a Chinese immigrant child growing up in an all-white neighborhood may feel isolated and alone. This isn’t rocket science, folks. This is government-funded brain sludge, sifted and spun and data mined until it fits whatever conclusions the authors want to draw from it. That’s the benefit the authors have not being required to explain, interpret, or otherwise analyze the statistics they have stuffed into this textbook. It’s the kind of intellectual pabulum that makes a person’s brains soft. If you are forced, like me, to take a class that uses this textbook and treats it as a mystical fount of wisdom, all I can is offer my sincere empathy.

*source for quote here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070907221530.htm

Rating: 1 / 5

I really like the way that the author(s) have layed out this text. I find it very easy to comprehend and review material. The examples and pictures are wonderful. Most of all I love the bonus side stories that coincide with each topic. Would definitely recommend the use of this book.
Rating: 5 / 5