Category: Essay Examples
Essay examples are of great value for students who want to complete their assignments timely and efficiently. If you are a student in the university, your first stop in the quest for research paper examples will be the campus library where you can get to view the sample essays of lecturers and other professionals in diverse fields plus those of fellow students who preceded you in the campus.
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Many college departments maintain libraries of previous student work, including essays, which current students can examine. This collection of free essay examples is our attempt to provide high quality samples of different types of essays on a variety of topics for your study and inspiration.
Drug addiction as a social phenomenon is a relatively recent construct. That is, despite the use of psychoactive drugs for thousands of years, drug use and abuse only became a social problem when the functioning of a member of a particular group or the activities of the group …
Few in the United States have not been touched by adoption—either as members of the adoption triad (biological parents, adoptive parents, and adopted persons) or being related to or having (had) an association with adoption involving others. Adoption is the legal and permanent placement of a child with …
Some people see the adoption of children by gay men or lesbians as a threat to the social fabric of society, whereas others view it as an appropriate placement resource for children awaiting an adoptive family. With more than 500,000 children in the nation’s foster care system and …
Transracial adoption (also known as inter-racial adoption) refers to adoptions that occur across racial boundaries. At the level of biology, no adoption is transracial because race is a meaningless category; however, because race is socially significant, transracial adoption remains a controversial method of family formation. In the United …
Affirmative action refers to programs designed to assist disadvantaged groups of people by giving them certain preferences. Affirmative action goes beyond banning negative treatment of members of specified disadvantaged groups to requiring some form of positive treatment in order to equalize opportunity. In the United States, beneficiaries of …
The structure of criminal liability or guilt in Anglo-American law is straightforward. (The same structure of liability applies in general in civil suits, but this entry focuses on criminal law.) Crimes are defined by their criteria, which lawyers call the “elements.” Most crimes require some prohibited action and …
Afrocentricity is a paradigm based on the idea that African people should reassert a sense of agency to achieve sanity. During the 1960s a group of African American intellectuals in the newly formed black studies departments at universities began to formulate novel ways of analyzing information. In some …
Ageism is a form of prejudice directed toward older members of a society. Like other forms of negative group stereotyping, ageism can vary in both its intensity and its effect on the targeted group. People who possess unflattering dispositions toward the elderly may not cause them direct harm …
From 1935 to 1996, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was the major government-funded means-tested public assistance program for low-income children and their caretakers. Its antecedents were states’ mothers pension programs, which reflected the child-centered, “maternalist” philosophy of the Progressive Era. Originally a relatively minor component of …
Alcoholism is a type of substance addiction characterized by a preoccupation with alcohol and impaired control over alcohol consumption. Alcoholism is similar to illicit drug addiction in its association with physical and psychological dependence. However, as alcohol consumption is legal and socially accepted, problematic use often goes unrecognized …
Alienation is related to social problems both in substance and in terms of how we look at social problems. In the context of modern everyday language and “commonsense” perspectives and views, the term alienation frequently is employed to express a feeling of separation—ranging from one’s experiences with others, …
For an immigrant, the American Dream is to achieve economic well-being and a good quality of life through hard work, entrepreneurship, and perseverance. It is the driving force behind most immigration, and its realization is the achievement dimension of the incorporation process. A main topic addressed in immigration …
The term Americanization generally refers to the assimilation of immigrants into U.S. society, a meaning now endowed with negative connotations. The unpopular interpretation rests on its association with the Americanization movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This movement, particularly during and after World War I, …
Anomie refers to the improper operation or relative absence of normative regulation in an aggregate entity or environment, ranging from groups and communities to entire societies and the globe. Most conceptualizations of anomie stress normative breakdown, making this aspect critical to understanding any form of anomie. Its importance …
The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 enacted mandatory minimum prison sentences designed to provide severe penalties for violations involving the possession or distribution of crack cocaine. Inspired by the hysteria surrounding the national crack and AIDS epidemics in the early 1980s, the Reagan administration reintroduced mandatory minimum sentencing …
The anti-globalization movement is a broad-based popular struggle involving workers, environmentalists, youths, peasants, the urban poor, indigenous people, and other actors across the developing and industrialized worlds striving for social and economic justice and greater democratic control over their daily lives. Activists come from diverse spheres, including nongovernmental …
Anti-Semitism is the active or passive, individual or collective, hatred of either empirically existing or purely mythological Jews, such that the signifier “Jew” functions as a representational substitute for social conduct or institutions deemed by the anti-Semite to be abnormal and pathological. Especially important is the manner in …
Apartheid (literally “apartness” in Afrikaans and Dutch) refers to a system of racial segregation enforced in South Africa by the white National Party from its election in 1948 until the first election open to all races in 1994. A high degree of de facto racial separation existed before …
Arms control is a means of addressing a major and enduring global social problem: arms proliferation. This entails the production and spread of weapons, ranging from small arms and light weapons, through missiles and military aircraft, up to weapons of mass destruction. Arms control involves a variety of …
Arson is the willful or malicious burning of property, and arson fires also entail the risk of intentional or inadvertent personal injury, including risk to firefighters. In the United States, at least 20 percent (and as much as 50 percent) of fire-related property damage is due to arson. …
