Sociologist, like everyone else, look at the world in different ways, and the books they write reflect this diversity. Social problems textbooks, for instance, don't all examine the same issues. They're written from different theoretical perspectives, and their authors have a variety of goals in mind in writing them. When we decided to write this book, we set three major goals for ourselves. First, we wished to equip student with useable knowledge about the social problems they currently encounter in their everyday lives and those they may expect to confront in their future careers. To do this, we've drawn from our experience as veteran instructors of the social problems course. We've observed that only a small percentage of the students who enroll in this course each semester are sociology majors. Instead, most are working toward degrees in business or the physical and natural sciences; few have had any exposure to sociology.