1. a sociological understanding of contemporary social problems and accurate information about them; 2. awareness of their social origins, collective definition, and how they might be effectively treated; 3. discernment on the importance of sociological theory, methods, and multilevel analyses; 4. a social ethics approach to public policy addressing social problems; 5. social activism—a commitm...

This article acquaints the clinical sociologist with the sociodynamic model underlying the family therapy approach associated with the "Palo Alto" group and referred to here as the strategic communication approach to family therapy (SCAFT). It establishes the relevance and compatibility of this form of therapy to sociological theory and practice. The basic features of the field of family therap...

We explore how ideas from infectious disease and genetics can be used to uncover patterns of cultural inheritance and innovation in a corpus of 591 national constitutions spanning 1789–2008. Legal “ideas” are encoded as “topics”—words statistically linked in documents—derived from topic modeling the corpus of constitutions. Using these topics we derive a diffusion network for borrowing from anc...