As a behavioral science and helping profession, rehabilitation must promote theory building and knowledge utilization through comprehensive and conscientious approaches. This article addresses notable failures to incorporate earlier and significant conceptual developments from rehabilitation into contemporary research. The identified gaps in scholarship acknowledgment concerned omissions of the groundbreaking work of several scholars who were shaped by Kurt Lewin’s mentorship and field theory. These authors advanced two fundamental principles: (a) the ecological perspective that behavior (including that associated with disability) can only be understood as the interaction of the person within an environmental context and (b) a strengths-based approach that rehabilitation assessments and interventions must tap into the assets of the person and the resources in the environment. The nexus and usefulness of these authors’ contributions have gone unrecognized in explanations of two relevant and popular psychosocial research agendas: (a) the new paradigm of disability and (b) the positive psychology movement. This article delineates these gaps in rehabilitation knowledge utilization, offers some interpretations for their occurrence, and recommends strategies to reduce the gaps. It also suggests how developments in theory or practice from rehabilitation research and philosophy could be better marketed to and utilized by our partners in other counseling/psychology specialties, disability studies, and the broader community interested in disability issues.
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