Filled with current topics and relevant examples that illuminate the content, Mooney, Knox, and Schachts UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL PROBLEMS provides you with a comprehensive, theoretically balanced exploration of social problems. The text progresses from a micro to macro level of analysis, focusing first on such problems as illness and health care, drugs and alcohol, and family problems, and then broadening to the larger issues of poverty and inequality, population growth, aging, environmental problems, and conflict around the world. The social problem in each chapter is framed in a global as well as a U.S. context. In addition, the three major theoretical perspectives are applied to the problem under discussion, and its consequences -- as well as alternative solutions -- are explored. Features such as "The Human Side" and "Self and Society" enable you to grasp how social problems affect the lives of individuals and apply your understanding of social problems to your own life.