Abstract
Scholars involved in the study of place are very clear about how they define and intend the characteristics of nonlinearity. As Gatrell [30] and others explain (e.g., [24, 25], [28]), in terms of a complex system like place, nonlinearity addresses the empirical fact that, more often than not, small or large changes in some aspect of a place (e.g., its health system, educational system, etc), particularly in the form of health interventions (e.g., new outpatient program, new educational accountability measures, etc) do not regularly lead to their expected, linearly related outcomes (e.g., a 25 % increase in prenatal care or graduation rates, etc).
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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Castellani, B., Rajaram, R., Buckwalter, J., Ball, M., Hafferty, F. (2015). Places Are Nonlinear. In: Place and Health as Complex Systems. SpringerBriefs in Public Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09734-3_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09734-3_9
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