"Peer Power" explodes existing myths about children's friendships, power and popularity, and the gender chasm between elementary school boys and girls. Based on eight years of intensive insider participant observation in their own children's community, Peter and Patti Adler discuss the vital components of the lives of preadolescents: popularity, friendships, cliques, social status, social isolation, loyalty, bullying, boy-girl relationships, and afterschool activities. They describe how friendships shift and change, how people are drawn into groups and excluded from them, how clique leaders...

Choice's Outstanding Academic Title list for 2013

2013 Honorable Mention for the Distinguished Book Award presented by the Midwest Sociological Society Honorable Mention for the Charles H. Cooley Award for Outstanding Book from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction

Cutting, burning, branding, and bone-breaking are all types of self-injury, or the deliberate, non-suicidal destruction of one's own body tissue, a practice that emerged from obscurity in the 1990s and spread dramatically...