James D. Wright

Written for the general public as well as for specialists, this volume details some of the numerous dimensions of the homelessness issue: the rise in poverty; the decline of low-income housing: problems in counting the homeless; the role of familial estrangement; mental illness; substance abuse; and health status and behaviors. The authors conclude with discussions of rural versus urban homelessness, street children in Latin America, and homelessness in postindustrial societies.

This is a book about "bad guys" and their guns. But Wright and Rossi contend that for every suspected criminal who owns and abuses a firearm, a hundred or more average citizens own guns for sport, for recreation, for self protection, and for other reasons generally regarded as appropriate or legitimate. Armed and Considered Dangerous is the most ambitious survey ever undertaken of criminal acquisition, possession, and use of guns.

Rev. ed. of: Weapons, crime, and violence in America. 1981.

The Dissent of the Governed is a diagnosis of what ails the body politic - the unwillingness of people in power to hear disagreement unless forced to - and a prescription for a new process of response. Carter examines the divided American political character on dissent, with special reference to religion, identifying it in unexpected places, with an eye toward amending it before it destroys our democracy. At the heart of this work is a rereading of the Declaration of Independence that puts dissent, not consent, at the center of the question of the legitimacy of democratic government. Carter warns that our liberal constitutional ethos - the tendency to assume that the nation must everywhere be morally the same - pressures citizens to be other than themselves when being themselves would lead to disobedience. This tendency, he argues, is particularly hard on religious citizens whose notion of community may be quite different from that of the sovereign majority of citizens. With reference to a number of cases, Carter shows that disobedience is sometimes necessary to the heartbeat of our democracy - and that the distinction between challenging accepted norms and challenging the sovereign itself, a distinction crucial to the Declaration of Independence, must be kept alive if we are to progress and prosper as a nation.

Autobiography about the authors life as a Steeplejack.

There are approximately 200 nations on Earth, and the social sciences are being practiced in each one, yet too little of this global enterprise is known to Western, particularly American, social scientists. Drawing upon five years of experience as Editor-in-Chief of a major international encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences, James D. Wright provides social scientists a representative sampling of the work of their international colleagues. The volume includes investigations into a myriad of questions. How have Muslims accommodated to life in Western societies? What were the demographic consequences of World War I? What are the economic, social, and environmental costs and benefits of hosting a cruise ship terminal? Has the situation of Honduran street children improved in the past two decades? What is the state of public health in Africa? Wright shows how social scientists outside the United States have answered all of these questions and many more. From efforts at historical preservation in the People's Republic of China to the sexual abuse of children in New Zealand, and from earthquake research in Japan to network jihadi terrorism, The Global Enterprise includes research that will intrigue anyone interested in what social scientists contribute to our understanding of contemporary social trends and advances, both locally and globally. Key research is underway in social science around the world, and it is far past time that Western social scientists learned of and learned from these findings--back cover.

"This book recounts two deaths, the murder of Mr. Wang Jin by 31 Red Guards in the Nanjing Foreign Language School, where the senior author was a young student at the time; and the earlier murder of Mrs. Bian Zhongyun of the Girls School affiliated with the Beijing Normal University in 1966. The book is a history of two small incidents in a massive social injustice and also an attempt to understand the Cultural Revolution (CR) within the framework of modern social movement theory. The book elaborates on the sources of violence in the CR, and the definition and periodization of the CR (that is, what was it, and when did it begin and end?)"--Back cover.

"The Handbook of Survey Research, Second Edition, builds on its widely-recognized 1983 predecessor edited by Peter H. Rossi, James D. Wright, and Andy B. Anderson. Wright, together with Peter V. Marsden, assembled this edition. A new introductory chapter reviews the development of survey research, and highlights new directions and expansion of the field during the past quarter century. Subsequent chapters, all but two entirely new to this edition, provide comprehensive coverage of survey research methods." "Editors Marsden (Department of Sociology at Harvard University and a Co-Principal Investigator of the General Social Survey) and Wright (Department of Sociology at the University of Central Florida where he directs the Institute for Social and Behavioral Sciences, and the long-time editor of Elsevier's journal Social Science Research) significantly enlarged this edition to reflect the vast changes and growth in the survey research industry over the past three decades. In addition to updated material on central survey processes including sampling, measurement theory, and questionnaire construction, the new Edition includes new chapters on such topics as total survey error, ethical considerations in conducting surveys, power analysis, the psychology of survey response, specific survey modes (mail, telephone, Internet, and mixed-mode surveys), linking survey data to GIS and administrative data, cross-national and cross-cultural surveys, archiving and dissemination, and many others." "Comprehensiveness and depth of coverage distinguish the Handbook of Survey Research, Second Edition, from other texts. Timely and relevant, it includes emerging topics that are only now becoming highly salient within the industry. An authoritative reference book providing extensive coverage of the field, the Handbook is a vital resource for social scientists and students who conduct or plan to conduct survey research."--Jacket.