ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a conception of social problems and elaborates a definition of the activities around which we feel a vigorous, substantive area of study might develop. The notion that social problems are a kind of condition must be abandoned in favor of a conception of them as a kind of activity known as claims-making activity. The chapter explains the social problems activities, particularly Richard Fuller and Myers' formulation that "value judgments lead people to define conditions as social problems". The activity of making claims, complaints, or demands for change is the core of what we call social problems activities. Claims-making is always a form of interaction: a demand made by one party to another that something be done about some putative condition. Claims express demands within a moral universe. Values are those statements that express the grounds or the basis of the complaint.
