Abstract. In topological dynamics a theory of recurrence properties via (Furstenberg) families was established in the recent years. In the current paper we aim to establish a corresponding theory of ergodicity via families in measurable dynamical systems (MDS). For a family F (of subsets of Z + ) and a MDS (X, B, µ, T ), several notions of ergodicity related to F are introduced, and characterized via the weak topology in the induced Hilbert space L 2 (µ). T is F -convergence ergodic of order k if for any A 0 , . . . , A k of positive measure, 0 = e 0 < · · · < e k and ε > 0, {n ∈ Z + : |µ(It is proved that the following statements are equivalent: (1) T is ∆ * -convergence ergodic of order 1; (2) T is strongly mixing; (3) T is ∆ * -convergence ergodic of order 2. Here ∆ * is the dual family of the family of difference sets.1. Introduction. By a topological dynamical system (TDS) (X, T ) we mean a compact metric space X together with a surjective continuous map T from X to itself. For a TDS (X, T ) and non-empty open subsets U and V of X let N (U, V ) = {n ∈ Z + : U ∩ T −n V = ∅}, where Z + is the set of nonnegative integers. Note that we use N to denote the set of positive integers. It turns out that many recurrence properties of TDS can be described using the return time sets N (U, V ) (see [1], [8], [14], [12], [13] and [10]). For example, for a TDS (X, T ) it is known that T is (topologically) strongly mixing iff N (U, V ) is cofinite, T is (topologically) weakly mixing iff N (U, V ) is thick [8], and T is (topologically) mildly mixing iff N (U, V ) is an (IP -IP ) * set [14], [12] for each pair of non-empty open subsets U and V . Recently, Huang and Ye [14] showed that a minimal system (X, T ) is weakly mixing iff the lower Banach density of N (U, V ) is 1, and (X, T ) is mildly mixing iff N (U, V ) is an IP * -set for each pair of non-empty open sets U and V .By a measurable dynamical system (MDS) we mean (X, B, µ, T ), where (X, B, µ) is a Lebesgue space and T : X → X is invertible and measure pre-