The Seventh Edition of Essentials of Sociology is based on the Eleventh
Edition of our best-selling text Introduction to Sociology. We created the
Essentials Edition for instructors and students who are looking for a briefer
book that can fit into a compressed academic schedule. We have reduced
the length of the book by roughly one-third, and we reduced the number of
chapters from twenty to sixteen. We cut selected topics to focus the
chapters on the core ideas of sociology, while still retaining the themes
that have made the text a successful teaching tool.