Beginning practitioners will appreciate Lesser and Pope's special attention to contemporary practice issues and populations, including military, immigrant and GLBT clients, multi-stressed families, and global issues at the micro and macro levels of practice. The most salient strengths of this text are:
Finally, the text fully integrates the multiple dimensions of human behavior. and levels of social work practice, first by providing separate chapters on neurobiological, psychological and spiritual theories of individual development, and on small group , family, organizational and community theory. These mulit-level concepts are then, woven through the second part of the text, which examines human behavior throughout the life cycle from a developmental contextual perspective.
This comprehensive text integrates multiple dimensions of the human experience in a reader-friendly style and provides the interface between developmental theory and practice.
Human Behavior and the Social Environment, 1/e, introduces and incorporates current research on the biological, psychological, socio-cultural, and spiritual dimensions of human behavior throughout the life-cycle. The authors provide an appropriate focus on contemporary perspectives that are central to the practice of social work, such as trauma, neurobiological underpinnings of behavior, chronic illness and disability. They pay particular attention to models of racial, ethnic, class, gender and gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identity development; to the influences of gender, sexual orientation, social class, race and culture on family structure and function, and to issues pertinent to a variety of “post-modern” family forms.
Additionally, the text explores macro influences of groups, communities and organizations in individual chapters. It also contains a chapter on social welfare policy that examines the impact of specific policies at each stage of the life-cycle and paves the way for new directions in research and future directions in policy and practice.
Joan Granucci Lesser