Group Ecology

Ecology is a branch of biology that analyzes the relationship between an organism and the setting where it lives. Groups can be analyzed in this way too. Every group occupies some setting, and no group can be fully understood without analyzing that setting. Analyses of the settings that groups occupy reveal a variety of environmental factors, ranging from the physical to the social to [Page 331]the temporal. Although researchers usually study the effects of environmental factors on groups, attempts by groups to control those factors are sometimes studied as well. That is, a setting can be both a cause and an effect of group activities.