Brooks/Cole Empowerment Series: Human Behavior in the Social Environment (SW 327 Human Behavior and the Social Environment)

I admit that I only have experience with this one HBSE textbook (and, in a quick search, I can find at least a dozen like it). But what I appreciate about this one is how quickly it gets through the foundational material and then begins applying that material to the stages of life. Biophysical, psychological, and social/spiritual consideration is given to all eight stages of life (the textbook uses Erik Erikson's stages as a baseline, but shifts the age range on some of them).While the text doesn't go quite far enough, it does a half-decent job of critiquing the classic models and understandings of human development of being biased toward white/male/Western, as those were the only populations upon which any extensive qualitative&quantitative studies were done. Unfortunately, in studying some minority / marginalized populations, we don't get new answers, just "oh, hey, these models might not apply." That really isn't the fault of the textbook though. It just shows how much more work needs to be done!

I was interested in a Kindle for college because I need the text-to-speech feature. I rented this book and used the Kindle app on my MacBook to get some idea of how well it works. I doesn't. The book itself is ok, but it does not support text-to-speech. If you buy a Kindle intending to use text-to-speech, you should know that it is not a default feature of the Kindle format. I give the book 4 stars but the Kindle format gets no stars. That is an average of 2 stars.

This book was one of the driest textbooks I have ever read. The chapters are very long and they take forever to read (and I don't read slow). While this book has a lot of good information in it, it has too much information in it. I often found myself trying to not fall asleep while reading this book, but then I could go read a different textbook and be just fine. I can understand how an instructor would find this book useful and want to use it, but as a student I will say that this book was awful and I am more than happy to be able to trade it in to Amazon and never see it again.

Excellent book for exposure for general systems of human behavior. It helps people view human behavior from perspective rather than looking at the individual's behavior in a vacuum.

I am not pleased with the quality of this item. Not only did I receive the item far more damaged than listed on the website, but the seller was not willing to offer a refund on the shipping cost sufficient to cover return shipping. It took a long while for the item to arrive and getting a replacement copy would have taken far too long.This book is also not particularly good. It is not well put together, the formatting looks old. Not worth the extra money to get this 'update' edition.

I used this book for a class. It came in great condition. There was some writing/highlighting in the book, though it was minimal and the book was still useful. It was a good purchase so far.

Served it's purpose for my college class.

Took forever to deliver