Patricia A. Adler

Peer Power explodes existing myths about children's friendships, power, and popularity, and the gender chasm between elementary school boys and girls. Based on eight years of intensive insider participant observation in their own children's community, the authors discuss the vital components in the lives of preadolescents: popularity, friendships, cliques, social status, social isolation, loyalty, bullying, boy-girl relationships, and afterschool activities. They describe how friendships shift and change, how children are drawn into groups and excluded from them, how clique leaders maintain their power and popularity, and how the individuals' social experiences and feelings about themselves differ from the top of the pecking order to the bottom. The Adlers focus their attention on the peer culture of the children themselves and the way this culture extracts and modified elements from adult culture. Children's peer culture, as it is nourished in those spaces where grownups cannot penetrate, stands between individual children and the larger adult society. As such, it is a mediator and shaper, influencing the way children collectively interpret their surroundings and deal with the common problems they face. The Adlers explore some of the patterns that develop in this social space, noting both the differences in the gendered cultures of boys and girls and their overlap into afterschool activities, role behavior, romantic inclinations, and social stratification. Peer culture contains the informal social mechanisms through which children create their social order, determine their place and identity, and develop positive and negative feelings about themselves.

There are a range of roles that can be played by ethnographers in field research. The choice of role will affect the type of information available to the researcher and the kind of ethnography written. The authors discuss the problems and advantages at each level of involvement and give examples of modern ethnographic studies.

"Cutting, burning, branding, and bone-breaking are all types of self-injury, or the deliberate, non-suicidal destruction of one's own body tissue, a practice that emerged from obscurity in the 1990s and spread dramatically as a typical behavior among adolescents. Long considered a suicidal gesture, [this book] argues instead that self-injury is often a coping mechanism, a form of teenage angst, an expression of group membership, and a type of rebellion, converting unbearable emotional pain into manageable physical pain. Based on the largest, qualitative, non-clinical population of self-injurers ever gathered, noted ethnographers Patricia and Peter Adler draw on 150 interviews with self-injurers from all over the world, along with 30,000-40,000 internet posts in chat rooms and communiqués. Their 10-year longitudinal research follows the practice of self-injury from its early days when people engaged in it alone and did not know others, to the present, where a subculture has formed via cyberspace that shares similar norms, values, lore, vocabulary, and interests. An important portrait of a troubling behavior, [the book] illuminates the meaning of self-injury in the 21st century, its effects on current and former users, and its future as a practice for self-discovery or a cry for help."--Publisher's description.

Packed with the most recent and relevant articles in the field, CONSTRUCTIONS OF DEVIANCE: SOCIAL POWER, CONTEXT, AND INTERACTION, Seventh Edition, shows you how to apply the concepts and theories of deviance to the world around you. The text's current, comprehensive coverage includes both theoretical analyses and ethnographic illustrations of how deviance is socially constructed, organized, and managed. Seasoned authors and award-winning professors, Patricia Adler and Peter Adler cover a wide variety of deviant acts--challenging you to see the diversity and pervasiveness of deviance in society. The text presents deviance as a component of society and examines the construction of deviance in terms of differential social power. Its unique "interactionist" or "constructionist" perspective on deviance explores the processes in society that create deviance. Ethnographic in character, the authors' intriguing selected studies focus on the experiences of deviants, the deviant-making process, and the ways in which people labeled as deviant in society react to that label. The balanced selection of readings is timely and engaging, while in-depth introduction, explanation of theory, and discussion questions after each reading guide you through the fascinating material. -- Book Description.