Help

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Students
  • Instructors

  • Our materials are broken down to individual chapters, listed in the left column of “Chapters” page. There, you can add each chapter you wish to purchase to your Cart and proceed to checkout. You are welcome to buy chapters as your semester progresses, or all at once. You must register and be signed in to purchase chapters.

    Alternatively, you can also purchase the All Chapters Collection (all sixteen chapters) from the right column of the “Chapters” page. This Collection contains all the same content as the individual chapters, and vice versa. We recommend only buying the Collection if you’ve been assigned at least 14 chapters.

    Once purchased, go to the “Purchased” page under “Chapters,” where all your purchased chapters will display with a “Read Now” button. When you select “Read Now,” you will be taken to a new window or tab with our e-reader, hosted by Bookshelf

    Student accounts should not require administrative approval. When our site is overwhelmed with new registrations, some student accounts are erroneously marked as needing approval. We have been working on correcting this error, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

    If you received this error, please email us at help@sociologyexperiment.com with the email or username you used to register, and someone from our team can get your account approved and accessible as soon as possible.

    The “All Chapters” Collection contains all available chapters of A Sociology Experiment, for students assigned most or all of the text. The products listed on the left side of the page are the same materials included in that version, but sold as individual chapters.

    A Sociology Experiment was designed for instructors to assign whichever chapters make sense for their class, and for students to only purchase the chapters they need. Students are advised to purchase these individual chapters if they are assigned fewer than fourteen chapters of the book, or wish to pace out their purchases over the semester.

    When you select ‘Read Now’ you will be redirected to a safe and secure website for accessing your purchase. Our new e-reader is provided by VitalSource Technologies, and all chapter text is now hosted through their site.

    As of this time, we only provide our materials digitally. We do not provide hardcopies or versions which users can print.

    Moving forward, our chapters will only be available using our new Bookshelf e-reader. We have also retired the Fall 2021 version of our text. If you need access to chapters purchased prior to January 5, 2023, please email us at help@sociologyexperiment.com so that we can assist you.

  • Please register as an instructor on our site’s landing page using an institutional email address. We verify each instructor on a daily basis, but you may have to wait 24-48 hours for our team to verify you. Once verified, you will have access to all the chapters on the “Chapters” page, as well as additional teaching resources.

    If you have not been given an institutional email address, your account has not been verified after 48 hours, or you would like to provide further information to help us verify you, please email us at help@sociologyexperiment.com.

    We sell our chapters individually to minimize the financial burden placed on students, and to encourage instructors to only use the materials that make sense for their course. We designed A Sociology Experiment to be a modular resource that gives instructors plenty of freedom about how they wish to integrate our materials into their syllabus. We believe that if an instructor is only assigning half the chapters, that’s all students should be expected to purchase.

    All bulk orders, including invoicing and payment, are handled directly through VitalSource’s Bulk Store. We only accept bulk orders for the complete book at the price listed on VitalSource’s website.

    If you are an instructor working with incarcerated students, we want to make our materials available to you at minimal cost. Please contact us at help@sociologyexperiment.com.

    In order to keep our materials affordable to students, we only provide our materials digitally. We do not provide hardcopies or versions which users can print.

    In order to keep our site functioning smoothly and securely, we periodically remove accounts we deem “expired.” Your account may have expired if you have not logged in a long time and we have been unable to reach you via your registered email. If your account was removed and you want to regain access to A Sociology Experiment, simply register again using the form on our home page.

If you have any other questions or need assistance, please email us at help@sociologyexperiment.com