There is a growing research body focusing on textbook biases, including with sociology textbooks. The majority of those research projects focus on the presentation or mis-presentation, or lack of inclusion, of certain topics regarding race, gender, and class. While it is evident that the use of race as a conceptual category in research has increased, race presentation in textbooks remains Eurocentric and condescending toward other racial groups (Martin and King-To 2003; Wadhwa 2022). Discussion on socioeconomic status in introductory sociology textbooks tends to resist depicting class in the U.S. context as a caste system (Foster 2022).
Studies on gender consistently indicate that women are marginalized and are overrepresented as victims; portrayed less frequently and as less able than men; and depicted as less likely to take part in social institutions, thus hindering the performance of female students (Lewis and Humphrey 2005; Good, Woodzicka, and Wingfield 2010). Textbooks are also prone to depicting a reality in which women of color are invisible, people of color are portrayed as “different,” and racial ethnic groups are considered as from other countries outside the U.S. (Lewis and Humphrey 2005). Textbooks may also portray race and gender as non-overlapping categories and are generally more racially inclusive than gender inclusive (Lewis and Humphrey 2005). A smaller proportion of current research examines how theory is presented in textbooks; structural-functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism are emphasized while feminism receives largely limited inclusion (Manza, Sauder, and Wright 2010).
At the intersection of the three categories of race, gender, and class, research suggests that although textbooks depict an accurate picture of racialized and gendered poverty, the selective location of information on poverty appears to counteract the intention of having inclusive and representative content in the first place (Hall 2000). Further research on bias states that gender is much more likely to be linked to socialization than race and class (Puentes and Gougherty 2013).