Book excerpt: This book is intended as a core textbook for courses in public health that examines current issues in health from a social and behavioral science perspective. It is a cross-disciplinary course (public health, medical sociology, health psychology, medical anthropology) and thus there are many ways to teach the course based on a particular instructor's perspective. The authors wrote the book because they were dissatisfied with the way other texts apply social science to public health and found that many texts being used were from related fields such as medicine, nursing or general health.The authors are planning to do a major revision based on reviews they have collected and the reviews we have collected. We believe the revised edition will essentially be a new text based on rich feedback. They will include new theory, new cases, new research, and a rich ancillary package. They will also reduce the frameworks presented to make the book more readable to students.