Clinical Social Diagnosis and Disasters as Socio-Natural Phenomena

This chapter presents a research methodology for understanding disasters and catastrophic events as complex socio-physical phenomena. The text is guided by the need to study social reality as a coherent presence and interaction among social, physical, technological, and social phenomena. In this context, the forms of data and the levels of their collection and processing are identified, as well as their interactions to produce concepts and theoretical proposals for real social phenomena associated with all types of disasters. In this effort, theoretical models from various sociological and philosophical schools, as well as the natural sciences, are employed that appear to exhibit some eclectic affinities with the real-world research method. This approach combines elements of empirical positivism with those of dialectical realism, with the primary aim of understanding theoretical work as a constituent part of empirical research, rather than the other way around, i.e., empirical data produced by various sciences and methodological traditions as a constituent element of the modern theory of socio-physical phenomena.