A Critique of Twenty Family and Marriage and the Family Textbooks* Norval D. Glenn** Twenty recent family and marriage and family textbooks are evaluated in terms of their adequacy for preparing students to make decisions about their family relations and to participate in public debates about family issues. No book is rated excellent, two are judged unacceptable, and most are considered poor or mediocre in balanced treatment of controversial issues, coverage of crucial topics, and/or scholarship and interpretation of evidence. Reasons for the less than desirable quality of the books are discussed and strategies for improvement are suggested. The quality of college-level education about marriages and families depends heavily on the textbooks available for adoption. The typical instructor of either a functional marriage and family course or an institutional sociology of the family course is not a family researcher, teaches courses on other subjects, lacks time to keep up with the research and theoretical literature on families, and thus depends largely on textbooks for knowledge of the subject matter. Instructors often adopt one textbook and use others as sources for lecture materials. The content of the courses tends to reflect that of the textbooks, and thus students are unlikely to be exposed to theories, data, and interpretations of evidence not discussed in the books. It is ironic, therefore, that there is no reliable quality control over textbooks from outside the marketplace, in which the effective demand comes from persons whose knowledge of the field is highly dependent on the books. Most adoption decisions are made by individual instructors or committees of persons who teach different sections of the same course. The only others who exercise much influence over the books are students, who are even less well-qualified to do so than instructors. Many (probably most) colleges and universities now require student evaluation of courses and use the results in decisions about salary increases and promotions; thus, student desires strongly affect course content and the characteristics of textbooks. Most other publications by college and university faculty members are evaluated by colleagues, department chairs, deans, promotion committees, and so forth, but textbooks are largely outside the academic reward system. Research universities rarely reward textbook writing, regardless of how well it is done, and even teaching-oriented institutions tend to consider royalties and visibility to be sufficient rewards. The academic rewards of authors of poor textbooks are not necessarily jeopardized, because the books are not systematically scrutinized by those who evaluate faculty performance. Publishers do have textbook manuscripts reviewed, but the review is not comparable to the peer review of articles by academic journals or monographs by university presses. Most of the reviewers are undergraduate teachers rather than researchers and scholars, and while such persons can judge the appeal of books to students, they often are not very able to detect factual errors, misrepresentations of the literature, misinterpretations of data, and similar flaws. These reviewers are drawn from the persons who provide the effective demand for the books; thus, the reviewing is not likely to counteract any perverse influences of the marketplace. Academic journals rarely review textbooks, and professional associations such as the American Psychological Association, the American Sociological Association, and the National Council on Family Relations exercise little or no oversight of textbook production. To my knowledge, no professional association interested in family-related textbooks has standards or guidelines to be used by textbook authors. The fact that publishers and authors are, for the most part, accountable only to the marketplace does not augur well for the scientific and intellectual quality of the textbooks. …
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Open Access
Jun 1, 2010
Ryan Scott Kozey + 1