Priorities for improving the scientific foundation of conservation policy in North America.

The Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) can enhance conservation of biodiversity in North America by increasing its engagement in public policy. Toward this end, the North America Section of SCB is establishing partnerships with other professional organizations in order to speak more powerfully to decision makers and taking other actions--such as increasing interaction with chapters--geared to engage members more substantively in science-policy issues. Additionally, the section is developing a North American Biodiversity Blueprint, which spans the continental United States and Canada and is informed by natural and social science. This blueprint is intended to clarify the policy challenges for protecting continental biodiversity, to foster bilateral collaboration to resolve common problems, and to suggest rational alternative policies and practices that are more likely than current practices to sustain North America's natural heritage. Conservation scientists and practitioners can play a key role by drawing policy makers' attention to ultimate, as well as proximate, causes of biodiversity decline and to the ecological and economic consequences of not addressing these threats.

Attrition in Models of Intergenerational Links Using the PSID with Extensions to Health and to Sibling Models.

Selective attrition potentially biases estimation of intergenerational links in health and economic status. This paper documents attrition in the PSID through 2007 for a cohort of children, and investigates attrition bias in intergenerational models predicting adult health, education and earnings, including models based on sibling differences. Although attrition affects unconditional means, the weighted PSID generally maintains its representativeness along key dimensions in comparison to the National Health Interview Survey. Using PSID, sibling correlations in outcomes and father-son correlations in earnings are not significantly affected by attrition. Models of intergenerational links with covariates yield more mixed results with females showing few robust impacts of attrition and males showing potential attrition bias for education and earnings outcomes. For adult health outcomes conditional on child background, neither gender shows significant impacts of attrition for the age ranges and models considered here. Sibling models do not produce robustly higher attrition impacts than individual models.

Use of the reasons for depression questionnaire with adolescents.

The Reasons For Depression Questionnaire (RFD) was developed to examine the explanations that people give for being depressed. In its original form it was evaluated with samples of non-depressed and depressed university students and other adults. The data reported here were used to evaluate the use of the RFD with a community sample of New Zealand adolescents. While the underlying eight-factor structure reported by the original authors was confirmed, with the addition of a ninth biological factor, additional principal component-factor analysis supported the existence of a six-factor solution for adolescents. The revised factor structure incorporated a revision of the scale's item content. It is proposed that an abbreviated scale (RFD-A) using 35 of the original 48 items would be more appropriate for use with adolescents.

Welfare reform and female headship.

While much of the focus of recent welfare reforms has been on moving recipients from welfare to work, many reforms were also directed at decisions regarding living arrangements, pregnancy, marriage, and cohabitation. This article assesses the impact of welfare reform waivers and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs on women's decisions to become unmarried heads of families, controlling for confounding influences from local economic and social conditions. We pooled data from the 1990, 1992, 1993, and 1996 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, which span the period when many states began to adopt welfare waivers and to implement TANF, and estimated logit models of the incidence of female headship and state-stratified, Cox proportional hazard models of the rates of entry into and exit from headship. We found little consistent evidence that waivers affected female headship of families.