Much of the violence found in introductory sociology textbooks has little instructional purpose, according to researchers who analyzed the popular textbooks that many colleges and universities use for their entry-level sociology courses.
The gratuitous, often graphic material in these books can affect learning and potentially traumatize or retraumatize students who have experienced trauma or violence, according to Erin Hatton, professor of sociology and criminology at the University at Buffalo and corresponding author of a study that conducted a comprehensive line-by-line examination of 22 SOC 101 textbooks.
The findings appear in the journal Teaching Sociology.
“We’re not saying that instructors and textbook writers should avoid teaching important social realties and issues related to violence, but many of these textbooks use violence too much, too cavalierly, and when it’s not necessary to do so,” says Hatton.
“Some of this material is horrifying and it’s time to rethink much of the content that’s included in these textbooks.”
The textbooks ranged widely in their amount of violence, but they often contained a lot of it, with a median of 252 cases of violence per book, about half of which could have been omitted with no pedagogical impact.
“Some of the texts are inundated with violence,” Hatton notes.
For example, one textbook contained 414 cases of violence among its 533 pages of text. If distributed across the entire book, that means that nearly four of every five pages contains violence. Another textbook had a case of violence on nearly every page, with 677 cases in a 687-page book.
Hatton says there is a guiding precept that emerges from this research.
“Do no harm,” she says. “Writers can and should do better and, like medical doctors, they should approach sociology in a way that helps students without causing harm. This requires understanding the pedagogical use and misuse of violence.
“Deciding to include violent content is something that demands care and deliberation.”
The idea for Hatton’s study came during the COVID-19 pandemic. When classes shifted online, she reread the text used in her sociology 101 course with a particular sensitivity for the hardships students were experiencing.
“It turned out to be the worst culprit of the books we analyzed,” she says. “I felt terrible about what they were reading and started compiling content warnings.”
She reached out to the book’s publisher with her concerns. The publisher was sympathetic but says the textbook’s author wasn’t interested in revising the text.
“That planted the seed,” says Hatton. “I wanted to know whether this much violence was in other textbooks or whether it was unique to the text I was using.”
The ambitious project included an examination of the 11 bestselling sociology texts that had been examined in other recent studies. Amazon’s bestseller list added another 11, excluding texts that were out of print or written for noncollegiate courses.
Hatton and her collaborators, graduate student Logan Phlox Williams and Srushti Upadhyay, a visiting professor at Purdue University who was a UB graduate student at the time of the research, developed coding for different types of violence and went through every book, line by line, analyzing more than 12,000 pages of text.
For each incident of violence, the researchers determined if it was necessary by asking, first, if the content was essential to understanding the topic, and secondly, if it could be eliminated or replaced with nonviolent content without changing the instructional content. If the answers were “no” and “yes” respectively, the material was coded as pedagogically unnecessary.
“I think this calls attention to the issue of violence broadly and what we’re exposed to on a daily basis,” says Hatton. “In the classroom, it draws much needed attention to how we discuss these issues and the care—or lack of care—in which we do so.”
And that attention is already having an impact. Hatton and Williams have presented some of the paper’s findings at a conference and Williams is currently working with a publisher, who was in attendance, to audit some of its introductory textbooks.
Source: University at Buffalo
