The diversity bonus in pooling local knowledge about complex problems.

Recently, theoreticians have hypothesized that diverse groups, as opposed to groups that are homogeneous, may have relative merits [S. E. Page, (2019)]-all of which lead to more success in solving complex problems.

Building a Collaborative Model of Sacroiliac Joint Dysfunction and Pelvic Girdle Pain to Understand the Diverse Perspectives of Experts.

Background: Pelvic girdle pain (PGP) and sacroiliac joint (SIJ) dysfunction/pain are considered frequent contributors to low back pain (LBP). Like other persistent pain conditions, PGP is increasingly recognized as a multifactorial problem involving biological, psychological, and social factors. Perspectives differ between experts and a diversity of treatments (with variable degrees of evidence) have been utilized.

Development of a collaborative model of low back pain: report from the 2017 NASS consensus meeting.

Background Context: Low back pain (LBP) is a multifactorial problem with complex interactions among many biological, psychological and social factors. It is difficult to fully appreciate this complexity because the knowledge necessary to do so is distributed over many areas of expertise that span the biopsychosocial domains.

Purpose: This study describes the collaborative modeling process, undertaken among a group of participants with diverse expertise in LBP, to build a model to enhance understanding and communicate the complexity of the LBP problem.

What determines social capital in a social-ecological system? Insights from a network perspective.

Social capital is an important resource that can be mobilized for purposive action or competitive gain. The distribution of social capital in social-ecological systems can determine who is more productive at extracting ecological resources and who emerges as influential in guiding their management, thereby empowering some while disempowering others. Despite its importance, the factors that contribute to variation in social capital among individuals have not been widely studied.

Local-scale dynamics and local drivers of bushmeat trade.

Bushmeat management policies are often developed outside the communities in which they are to be implemented. These policies are also routinely designed to be applied uniformly across communities with little regard for variation in social or ecological conditions. We used fuzzy-logic cognitive mapping, a form of participatory modeling, to compare the assumptions driving externally generated bushmeat management policies with perceptions of bushmeat trade dynamics collected from local community members who admitted to being recently engaged in bushmeat trading (e.

Knowledge gain and behavioral change in citizen-science programs.

Citizen-science programs are often touted as useful for advancing conservation literacy, scientific knowledge, and increasing scientific-reasoning skills among the public. Guidelines for collaboration among scientists and the public are lacking and the extent to which these citizen-science initiatives change behavior is relatively unstudied. Over two years, we studied 82 participants in a three-day program that included education about non-native invasive plants and collection of data on the occurrence of those plants.