a School of Social Work, University of Illinois, School of Social Work, Children and Family Research Center, 1010, W. Nevada Street, Urbana, IL 61801, USA b Michigan State University, School of Social Work, 254 Baker Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA c University of Illinois at Chicago, Office of the Chancellor (MC 102), 601 S. Morgan Street, 2833 UH, Chicago, IL 60607-7128, USA d Department of...

The term ‘science’ encompasses a wide range of disciplines, and implies that there must be some common conceptual framework underlying the full range of activities from the physical through to the ecological sciences. At the physics and molecular biology end of the spectrum, the use of hypotheses seems to be standard practice. At the ecology and social sciences end, the use of explicitly articu...

Qualitative reasoning is traditionally associated with the domain of physics, although the domain of application is, in fact, much broader. This paper investigates the application of qualitative reasoning beyond the domain of physics. It presents a case study of application in the social sciences: the density dependence theory of organizational ecology. It discusses how the different nature of ...

Contrary to common belief, decomposition of diversity into independent richness and evenness components is mathematically impossible. However, richness can be decomposed into independent diversity and evenness or inequality components. The evenness or inequality component derived in this way is connected to most of the common measures of evenness and inequality in ecology and economics. This pe...

Resilience studies build on the notion that phenomena in the real world should be understood as dynamic social ecological systems. However, the scholarly community may not be fully aware that Social Ecology, as a conceptual framework, has a long intellectual history, nor fully cognizant of its foundational theory. In the article, the authors trace the intellectual roots and core principles of S...