This article argues that the three most popular versions of constructionism in social problems research fail to eliminate social conditions as causal variables. Strict constructionism fails to empirically ground its analyses without reference to social conditions. Contextual constructionism 'ontologically gerrymanders' out social conditions as causal variables of social problems. Finally, debunking constructionism depends on the assumption that objectivism is true and then uses a negative theory of objectivism as constructionism in order to conduct investigations. That being so, the study of social problems should again investigate the way social conditions, as contextual to claims-making processes, create social problems. The ways in which opportunity structures affect the timing of the prominence and form of social problems is presented as a fruitful alternative.

Extending Small and McDermott’s ‘conditional perspective’, Blalock’s minority competition theory is used to explain how the relationship between African Americans and the number of supermarkets in a zip code depends on the city in which it resides. The 2010 American Community Survey and ZIP Business pattern data are examined with hierarchical general linear models to explore whether the previously observed negative relationship between the percentage of African Americans and the number of supermarkets in a zip code depends on the percentage of African Americans in the city. The results show that the relationship between the percentage of African Americans and the number of supermarkets depends on the percentage of African Americans in the city in the U-shaped pattern predicted by minority competition theory. Applications of minority competition to other theories of the unequal distribution of resources in cities are discussed.

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Resilience is a broad concept allowing us to understand health and well-being as a multidimensional process that continually grapples with a multitude of stressors. Currently, there are efforts across disciplines and scales to develop this concept of resilience. Unfortunately, individual and community resilience efforts tend to only abstractly conceptualize macroscale dynamics while social-ecological efforts tend to treat individuals and communities as nonindependent components of these macroscale dynamics. Combining these efforts is needed to create a robust dialog around resilience. This paper reviews and synthesizes social-ecological, community, and individual resilience literature by proposing longitudinal, multilevel models of resilience. In developing these models, some of the issues that have prevented synthesizing these literatures are resolved, including generalizability issues, within system variation, and the operationalization of social and natural and micro-and macroscale factors. Three brief examples are presented to elaborate on the utility of the multilevel model of resilience.