A password-protected instructor teaching site, available at edge.sagepub.com/ballantine7e, provides integrated sources for all instructor materials, including the following key components for each chapter:
The test bank, available in Word and ExamView, contains multiple-choice, true/false, short-answer, and essay questions for each chapter. The test bank provides you with a diverse range of prewritten options as well as the opportunity to edit any question and/or insert your own personalized questions to assess students’ progress and understanding effectively.
Editable, chapter-specific Microsoft PowerPoint slides offer you complete flexibility in easily creating a multimedia presentation for your course and highlight essential content, features, and artwork from the book.
Lecture notes summarize key concepts on a chapter-by-chapter basis to help with preparation for lectures and class discussions.
Chapter-specific discussion questions can help you launch classroom interaction by prompting students to engage with the material and by reinforcing important content.
Lively and stimulating ideas for class activities can be used in class to reinforce active learning. The activities apply to individual or group projects.
And much more!
Interactive E-Book
Our Social World is also available as an interactive e-book, which can be packaged with the text for just $5 or purchased separately. This interactive e-book includes premium video resources.
SAGE Coursepacks
SAGE coursepacks make it easy to import our quality instructor and student resource content into your school’s learning management system (LMS) with minimal effort. Intuitive and simple to use, SAGE coursepacks give you the control to focus on what really matters: customizing course content to meet your students’ needs. The SAGE coursepacks, created specifically for this book, are customized and curated for use in Blackboard, Canvas, Desire2Learn (D2L), and Moodle.
In addition to the content available on the SAGE edge site, the coursepacks include the following:
Pedagogically robust assessment tools that foster review, practice, and critical thinking and offer a better, more complete way to measure student engagement, including the following:Diagnostic chapter pretests and posttests that identify opportunities for student improvement, track student progress, and ensure mastery of key learning objectivesAssignable premium video and SAGE Stats data activities that bring concepts to life, increasing student engagement and appealing to different learning styles; the activities feed to your gradebookIntegrated links to the e-book version that make it easy to access the mobile-friendly version of the text, which can be read anywhere, anytime
Student Study Site
An open-access student study site, available at edge.sagepub.com/ballantine7e, provides a variety of additional resources to build students’ understanding of the book content and extend their learning beyond the classroom. Students will have access to the following features for each chapter:
E–flash cards and web quizzes. These mobile-friendly resources reinforce understanding of key terms and concepts outlined in the chapters.
SAGE journal articles. Exclusive full-text journal articles have been carefully selected for each chapter. Each article supports and expands on the concepts presented in the chapter.
Video, audio, and web links. These carefully selected web-based resources feature relevant articles, interviews, lectures, personal stories, inquiries, and other content for use in independent or classroom-based explorations of key topics.
MCAT guide. This guide summarizes the content in each chapter, highlighting the relevant topics tested on the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test). Each chapter entry also contains links to resources that allow students to understand and explore specific topic areas in more detail.
And much more!
What Is New in the Seventh Edition?
In this major revision we have updated all data, added many new studies, and added new emphases in sociology, such as environmental sociology. The following list provides a summary of key changes:
Thoroughly revised Chapter 15, bringing Urban Sociology and Population under the umbrella of Environmental Sociology and adding a new section on climate change.
Included new Sociologists in Action features, such as Richard M. Carpiano’s “Connecting Personal Health to Community Life” (Chapter 14).
Revised the Engaging Sociology features, with opportunities for data analysis by students.
Updated the Contributing to Our Social World: What Can We Do? features to provide new recommendations for how students can get involved.
Added new and updated figures and maps.
Added many new topics, including the influence of robots and artificial intelligence on workers, race relations in the Trump era, issues related to transgender identity and gender fluidity, sexual harassment in the workplace, declining marriage rates, the impact of tracking for students at all academic achievement levels, smoking as an example of health and inequality in the United States, gun violence and the student movement to control access to guns, and Facebook’s handling of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The core elements of the book—with the unifying theme and the social world model at the beginning of every chapter—have not changed.
Finally, although we had been told that the writing was extraordinarily readable, we have tried to simplify sentence structure in places. In short, we have tried to respond to what we heard from all of you—both students and instructors (and yes, we do hear from students)—to keep this book engaging and accessible.
A Personal Note to the Instructor
What is truly distinctive about this book? This text tries to break the mold of the typical textbook synthesis, a cross between an encyclopedia and a dictionary. Our Social World is a unique course text that is a coherent essay on the sociological imagination—understood globally. We attempt to radically change the feel of the introductory book by emphasizing coherence, integrating themes, and current knowledge about learning and teaching (such as the sociological literacy framework), but we also present much traditional content. Instructors will not have to throw out the well-honed syllabus and begin from scratch, but they can refocus each unit, so it stresses understanding of micro-level personal troubles within the macro-level public issues framework. Indeed, in this book, we make clear that the public issues must be understood as global.
Here is a text that engages students. They say so! From class testing, we know that the writing style, structure of chapters and sections, Thinking Sociologically features, wealth of examples, and other instructional aids help students stay focused, think about the material, and apply it to their lives. It neither bores them nor insults their intelligence. It focuses on deep learning rather than memorization. It develops sociological skills of analysis rather than emphasizing
