Adolescence

Adolescence

By: John Santrock  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Adolescence by Santrock - Comprehensive (almost to a fault) content.
Very little attention to students with disabilities and impact on development.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Book titled Adolescence - The book is great. I bought it for a class I am taking online with Liberty University. I got it in great condition and in a very timely manner. Thanks for the quick mail. I waited awhile before I ordered it so I got it right before I needed it.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Ideal transaction. - The item arrived in a timely manner and arrived in the exact expected condition. It was a quick and painless transaction with no surprises. I'm very satisfied.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Perfectly described - I was afraid to order this book wondering if it was going to be beaten up worst then described. But everything described of this book was right! It was a bit better then how I thought it would be!

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Informative, but sloppy. - I have rather mixed feelings about this book; the good news is, it covers a lot of ground, works very hard at being impartial and evenhanded when describing various schools of thought regarding various aspects of adolescent psychology, and very specifically addresses the issue, when first describing statistical analysis, that correlation does not equal causation.

The bad news is, it's rather sloppily written, with numerous typos and sentences that either don't parse particularly well, or just don't make any sense ("In this study, for both boys and girls, lack of parental support and dietary restraint preceded future increases in body satisfaction" pg. 63, being an example of the latter, as was "After four months, the participants in the physical education class had improved their cardiovascular fitness and lifestyle activity (such as walking instead of taking the stairs and walking instead of driving short distances) pg 74, or "...40 percent of children who become obese have one obese parent, and 70 percent of children who become obese have two obese parents." pg 500; for an example of a simple typo that slipped through the editing process, the sentence "Having delinquent peers increases the risk of becoming delinquent for example, two recent studies found that the link between associating with delinquent; peers and engaging in delinquency held for both boys and girls..." pg 492, and another is on page 119, where we are told that "Three of the Wexler subscales are shown in figure 3.15", when in fact there are only two subscales shown in that figure, or again on page 128, when we are treated to the sentence "Capacity and speed of processing speed, often referred to as cognitive resources..."

Further, there is a bit too much of a tendancy to strive for political correctness for my taste; the text will expound at great length as to why a particular style of parenting, for instance, is less than ideal, but will then tie itself in knots justifying that particular parenting style when it is used in cultures other than our own; heaven forbid that it declare that a parenting style popular in another culture is WRONG. Unless, of course,it is used in our culture; then it can be declared wrong.

But perhaps the worst offense that this book commits is that it consistently, frequently, if not universally, ignores its own warning about not confusing correlation with causation. Many, many instances can be cited in which a study demonstrated a correlation, and this information is treated as if it showed a causation. For instance, on page 63 we are told that "A study indicated that 12 to 17 year old girls who were patients in psychiatric hospitals who had a negative body image were more depressed, anxiety-prone, and suicidal than same-aged patients who were less concerned about their body image." Granted, the text did not expressly state that having a negative body image caused the greater mental difficulties, but it certainly seemed implied, yet an equally likely explanation is that greater depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation might cause poorer body image, or indeed self-image in general. And on page 75, we are informed that "Eleventh-grade students who participated in organized sports were more likely to be successful academically...than their counterparts who did not participate in organized sports", as if suggesting that participating in sports raised the quality of the academic work of the participants, without even considering the possibility that the increased grades might be the result of teachers giving athletes grades that they didn't earn in order to let them maintain their academic standing and protect the school team's competitiveness, an event which has certainly been known to happen.

There are many more examples of each of these problems to be found in this book; these were just a few that I was able to make note of. So although there is much useful information to be found here, I cannot rate this book above three stars; it is just too sloppy for that.

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