Roger A. Straus

I'm one of those late 60s types who was never really a hippie (they came a few years down the pike)... Traveled a lot of the roads available down the years. Ended up here, which is not a bad place to find oneself.

Been there, watched it happen, even lent a hand. Generally you'll find me at the margins. A professional dilettante who does not understand the phrase, "mind your own business" (synonym for "sociologist").

When I was in graduate school, I started a self-hypnosis clinic to support myself and my family. That inspired "Strategic Self-Hypnosis," a best-seller that went through 10 printings even thought I'd been told that the self-help market was passe. A few years later, my publisher asked for a follow up, "Creative Self-Hypnosis." They sold a Japanese translation (which is absolutely beautiful) and a Spanish translation (which I have never seen) and put out a second edition of "Strategic." The publisher folded, so I republished them. I am thrilled that people are still reading these works, sometimes writing me to say nice things about my books and how they have helped them.

As a graduate student and child of Holocaust survivors, I became interested in doing something with sociology other than academic research and teaching. Making it useful to human beings. So I cofounded what is now the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology and put out a textbook designed to turn on students to the possibilities of "Using Sociology: an Introduction from the Applied and Clinical Perspectives." More recently, I co-edited a follow-up text of case studies, "Doing Sociology."

After a stint in academia, I've made my living as a marketing researcher and consultant. In 2019 I published "Mastering Focus Groups and Depth Interviews: a Practitioner's Guide," sharing what I have learned about designing, doing, analyzing, and making effective use of in-person and online qualitative research. I'm semi-retired now, but my clients won't let me stop.

Most recently, I brought together a collection of my poetry, "From Prime to Prime: A Marginalist Manifesto." These poems, the skeleton of the story of my life, published and unpublished, were written between the ages of 17 and 73 ("prime" to "prime," get it?). They run from the sacred to the profane, inspirational to satirical or just plain comic, with a dash of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll maybe wonder, "What the hell?" You can read it for free on Kindle Unlimited.