The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between adolescents' food preferences and their mothers' attitudes and knowledge about foods and nutrition in Phitsanulok Province, Thailand. Subjects included 30 boys and 35 girls randomly selected from 11th grade classrooms at two high schools in Phitsanulok, and their mothers. An Attitudes Toward Foods and Nutrition Ouestionnaire (ATFN) and Knowledge About Foods and Nutrition Questionnaire (KAFN) were used to assess mothers' attitudes and knowledge about foods and nutrition, respectively. A Food Preference Questionnaire (FPQ) and a 24-Hour Dietary Recall Interview (DRI) were used to assess adolescents' food preferences and to determine their dietary nutrient intakes, respectively. Application of path analytic procedures to the data revealed that while fathers' and mothers' education, occupation and family income were significantly related together in complex ways, only mothers' occupation had a direct negative effect on their attitudes toward "food preparation and caring about nutrition". In addition, mothers' attitudes toward the "importance of nutrition and meals" had a direct positive effect on their attitudes toward "food preparation and caring about nutrition". Furthermore, mothers' "general nutrition knowledge" had a direct positive effect on their knowledge about "food composition", which in turn had a direct positive effect on their knowledge about a "well-balanced diet and protein". Finally, while mothers' attitudes toward "food preparation and caring about nutrition" had a direct positive effect on their adolescents' food preferences, mothers' "general nutrition knowledge" had a direct negative effect on their adolescents' food preferences. With respect to the relationships between adolescents' food preferences and their nutrient intakes, their preferences for foods in the Meat food group were significantly and positively related to their calorie, carbohydrate, and total fat intakes. In addition, adolescents' preferences for foods in the Vegetable and Vegetable Products food group were significantly and positively related to their total fat intake. Furthermore, adolescents's preferences for foods in the Fats and Oils food group were significantly and positively related to their calorie, carbohydrate, protein, and total fat intakes. Finally, a significant curvilinear relationship was found between adolescents' preferences for foods in the Cereal and Grain Products food group and their iron intake. / Graduation date: 1993

The chapters of this dissertation explore complementary areas of applied microeconomics, within the fields of experimental and environmental economics. In each case, preferences and institutions interact in ways that enhance or subvert efficiency. The first chapter, "The Girl Scout Cookie Phenomenon," uses a laboratory experiment to study favor trading in a public goods setting. The ability to practice targeted reciprocity increases contributions by 14%, which corresponds directly to increased efficiency. Subjects discriminate by rewarding group members who have been generous and withholding rewards from ungenerous group members. At least some reciprocal behavior is rooted in other-regarding preferences. When someone is outside the "circle of reciprocity," he gives less to the public good than in other settings. We find no evidence of indirect reciprocity. We find two behavioral types in each treatment, differing in baseline giving but not in tendency to reciprocate. The second chapter, "The Effects of Conservation Reserve Program Participation on Later Land Use," studies another public goods issue: conservation. The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) pays farmers to retire farmland. We use a treatment effect framework to find that ex-CRP land is 21-28% more likely to be farmed than comparable non-CRP land. This implies that the CRP improves low-quality land, making it more attractive to farm. This could demonstrate inefficiency, since farmers gain private benefit from a program meant to provide a public good. On the other hand, farmed ex-CRP land is more likely to adopt conservation practices, although this may not be caused by CRP participation. The third chapter, "Learning from Mistakes," examines financial decisions by adult Rwandans in institutions inside and outside the lab. Over 50% of subjects make irrational choices over risk—choices that likely do not reflect their preferences, and are therefore likely inefficient—and these subjects share tendencies in their take-up of financial instruments. Risk-averse individuals are more likely to belong to a savings group and less likely to take out an informal loan. For those who make mistakes, however, as they become more risk averse, they are less likely to belong to a savings group and more likely to take up informal credit.

This dissertation consists of three essays investigating the role of early life events, family environment and personal choices in shaping a child’s chances for human capital accumulation. The first essay examines how physical stature of a child measured in terms of age standardized height influences his/her selection for family labor activities vs. schooling in rural Ethiopia using malnutrition caused by exposure to significant weather shocks in early childhood as sources of identification for the child’s physical stature. We find no evidence that better physical stature of the child leads to his/her positive selection for full-time child labor activities. On the other hand we found reasonably strong and consistent evidence that physically more robust children are more likely to combine child labor and schooling than physically weaker children. The findings indicate that, although better early childhood nutrition leads to higher chances of attending school, it may also put the child at additional pressure to participate in family labor activities which may be reflected in poor performance in schooling. The second essay empirically investigates whether the quantity deficit in the children of the mother’s preferred gender is compensated through their favorable treatment in terms of investment in schooling and nutrition (referred to as compensating hypothesis) and to what extent the mother uses her bargaining power in the family to influence this process. We use data from siblings and twins in two rounds of the demographic and health surveys of Ethiopia with robustness checks using a similar but larger data set from India. We find the mother’s bargaining power working in the opposite direction to that of the compensating hypothesis in the case of child schooling and having no substantive role in the case of child nutritional health. Our findings for child schooling imply that mother’s empowerment could turn out to be unfavorable to a child’s attendance of schooling in the circumstances where the child is needed to help out with family activities. In the third essay we use date from the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of the Youth (NLSY97) to examine the extent to which high school completion (and to a limited extent college enrollment) are influenced by the choice teenagers make as to when to start dating and/or engage in sex, how many dating and/or sex partners to maintain, and how frequently to engage in sexual and/or dating activities. We use indicators of parental and peer religiosity as instruments for teenager’s involvement in sex and dating activities. While our results for teenage dating are generally weaker than those for teenage sex, the overall pattern of our estimates suggests that teenage sex and dating could have significant effects not only on high school completion but also the subsequent enrollment in a college.

The purpose of this dissertation is to identify the impact of moral emotions (sympathy and empathy) and religious education on individual behavior. This dissertation is divided into three main chapters. The first chapter examines the effect of sympathy and empathy on tax compliance. We run a series of experiments in which we employ methods such as priming, the Davis Empathic Concern scale, and questions about frequency of prosocial behaviors in the past year in order to promote and to identify empathy and sympathy in subjects. We observe the subjects’ decisions in a series of one-shot tax compliance game presented at once and with no immediate feedback. Our results suggest that the presence and/or the promotion of sympathy in most cases encourage tax compliance. The second chapter takes into consideration religious schooling as a way of helping the development of religiosity or morality on individuals. Our intent is to investigate the effect of religious education on charitable donations in adulthood. Our empirical analysis is based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics dataset. Our estimation results indicate that there is a positive effect of religious education on donations to secular and religious organizations. The third chapter explores the hypothesis that sympathetic individuals are more likely to support income redistribution because they believe that the poor may benefit from this policy. We use data from the General Social Survey to estimate support for income distribution. Our results suggest that some measures of sympathy have a positive effect on support for redistribution. Across all three main chapters, we find that sympathy has mostly small and positive effects on the types of behavior examined in this dissertation, although we are not able to determine the impact of religious education on charitable donations. Despite the sometimes weak results of this research caused by the limitations of the available data and the complexity of the issues studied, we believe that the development of these moral emotions is likely to generate benefits to society.

This study aimed to investigate a) which type of written feedback (direct feedback or use of error codes) university prep-school EFL students with elementary level of proficiency prefer to receive on their written texts, b) whether or not the (mis)match between students&rsquo / preferences and received feedback affect their level of improvement in writing, and c) to what extent the students&rsquo / previous writing experience affect their preference for the type of written feedback. In order to determine the students&rsquo / preferences for a specific type of feedback and to find out their previous writing experiences, a questionnaire was designed. Moreover, the participants were given two subsequent writing tasks with the purpose of determining the level of improvement in their linguistic accuracy after receiving their (not) preferred type of feedback. The results show that the majority of the students in the preparatory class with Elementary level prefer to receive use of error codes in their written texts / however, giving them what they ask for may not contribute to their improvement as would be expected. Moreover, some conclusions are made as to the relationship between the students&rsquo / previous writing experience and their current practices.

This dissertation combines three contributions to the literature on the determinants of well-being and the social nature of preferences. Departures from self-centred, consumption-oriented decision making are increasingly common in economic theory and are empirically well motivated by a wide range of behavioural data from experiments, surveys, and econometric inference. The first two contributions are focused on the idea that reference levels set by others’ consumption may figure prominently in both experienced well-being and in decision making. In the first paper, the well-being question is addressed empirically through the use of self-reported life satisfaction and high-resolution census and survey data in Canada. Strong income externalities are found at multiple spatial scales after controlling for various confounding factors. The second paper explores the general equilibrium consequences of a utility function having an explicit comparison with neighbours’ consumption. The question is investigated in a model in which decision makers knowingly choose their neighbours — and hence their consumption reference level — as well as their own consumption expenditure, thereby helping to set the reference level for nearby others. For both discrete and continuous distributions of types in an economy with a heterogeneous population undergoing such endogenous formation of consumption reference groups, there exist general equilibria in which differentiation of neighbourhoods occurs endogenously. The novel welfare implications of growth in such economies are described. The final paper addresses econometric reservations about the use of subjective reports as dependent variables. The date and location of survey interviews are combined with weather and climate records to construct the random component of weather conditions experienced by respondents on the day of their interview. Standard inferences about the determinants of life satisfaction remain robust after taking into account this significant source of affective bias.

Detailed knowledge about the habitat requirements of butterflies is vital for successful conservation. The aim of the present study was to examine the habitat requirements of the endangered butterfly Scolitantides orion on 15 sites in Östergötland, Sweden. The requirements of adults and ovipositing females were studied with regard to several environmental variables measured at three scales; small, transect and large scale. The probability of finding adults increased with decreasing tree cover at the small scale, and adult numbers increased with the proportion of bare rock at the large scale. In contrast, ovipositing females mainly responded to the small scale. The main finding was that females oviposited in areas with higher tree cover (< 70 %) than that preferred by dwelling adults (< 20 %). However, there was a greater probability of finding eggs when tree cover was less than 50 %. Furthermore, egg numbers on host plants increased with the number of leaves on the stem and with the proportion of surrounding bare rock or bare ground. At the transect scale, females oviposited in areas with a higher density of host plants. To conclude, S. orion predominately inhabits open areas with warm microclimatic conditions for dwelling and oviposition. To conserve this species, suitable areas containing nectar plants and high densities of host plants with large leaf numbers and surrounded by large proportions of bare rock or bare ground, should be preserved. The areas should be maintained by selective clearing at regular intervals to uphold canopy openness and heterogeneity.

Visitor activities in parks often have a heavy impact on the soil, vegetation, water and wildlife. In front country areas, the most extreme damage is concentrated on and adjacent to recreational trails. Aside from controlling the numbers, activities and behaviours of trail users, managers may choose to make trails more resistant to impact through surfacing. Unfortunately, surfacing may have negative influences on park visitors' enjoyment of trails by limiting access or detracting from the primitive setting. In addition, some surfaces may be ineffective in certain environmental conditions such as wet ground or steep slopes. Finally, the wide variety in construction and maintenance costs may make some surface types economically unfeasible. The goals of this research are to investigate the role of trail surfacing in the management of impacts from outdoor recreation; to develop better understanding of the social, economic and environmental aspects of trail surfacing decisions; and to explore a comprehensive framework for incorporating these three factors in trail management. It is hoped that this research can assist park managers in selecting surfacing options to reduce visitor impact without excessively compromising recreational experience or organizational limitations, such as financial resources. In addition to a comprehensive review of literature on visitor impact management on trails and surfacing techniques, this research employs three methods to further investigate the social, environmental and economic aspects of trail surfacing: a trail user survey, manager survey and trail condition assessment. The trail user survey was conducted at two well-used natural areas in southwestern Ontario, Canada: Presqu'ile Provincial Park and Belfountain Conservation Area. Surveys at each area explored trail users' perceptions and preferences of trail surfacing techniques in late summer 1999. The managers' survey provided insight into organizational approaches to surfacing, including construction cost and observations on recreational or environmental effectiveness. Finally, the trail condition assessment explored an approach to determining environmental effectiveness of trail surfacing techniques, but was limited by the physical and recreational variation between trails. Seven recommendations for trail managers are presented, tying in several conceptual frameworks of visitor impact management and trail surfacing decisions developed in the thesis. First, trail managers are recommended to develop a full understanding of trail design principles and alternative visitor impact management techniques. If surfacing is selected as the best impact management technique, trail managers should obtain as much information on user characteristics, environmental conditions and organizational limitations as possible. Despite the benefits and drawbacks for all surfaces, road base gravel (or angular screenings with fines) merits special attention as an excellent surface, while asphalt and concrete are not recommended for front country, semi-primitive recreation. Finally, trail managers are encouraged to share information on surfacing more freely and open surfacing decision processes to affected trail users. Overall, trail managers are provided with an approach to surfacing decisions that considers the social, environmental and economic aspects of trail surfacing, with the goal of working toward more enjoyable, environmentally responsible and cost-effective trail solutions.

As much of the growing population of North America is accommodated within cities or on their fringes, one needs to understand how these people are managing their private outdoor space. Within the cities of Kitchener and Waterloo, Ontario, Canada a randomly selected set of residential occupancies were surveyed in 1994 and 2004 about their yard landscaping and maintenance practices. Parallel mail-out questionnaires were delivered to more than 1,000 randomly selected addresses in both 1994 and 2004. Approximately 30 percent of surveyed occupancies completed the questionnaire in both years. Over one-third of respondents from both 1994 and 2004 were matched together based on individual, household, or address information. The matched respondent results were used to validate similarities and identify any inconsistencies between survey years. In general, matched respondent trends did not differ substantially from the overall study trends. <br /><br /> This study found that much of the outdoor space on residential properties consists of turfgrass lawn. Lawns were the dominant form of landscaping in both 1994 and 2004. Although respondents' attitudes towards lawns shifted slightly in favour of more gardens in the 2004 survey compared to 1994, respondents' actual landscaping styles and behaviours did not follow suit. Regardless of minor differences in attitudes between survey years, turfgrass was reported to be present in more than 85 percent of respondents' yards. On average, lawns were estimated to cover more than half of respondents' total private outdoor space in both 1994 and 2004. Likewise, more than 60 percent of respondents in both survey years indicated that their yard reflected a monoculture lawn. When compared with five other styles of landscaping, the monoculture lawn was found attractive and well-liked by approximately half the respondents in both survey years. In addition to the prevalence and preference for lawns, lawns were seen as practical to maintain as: the majority of respondents had a lawnmower ? mostly gas-powered; respondents were willing to spend almost $200 a year to water their lawn, on average; the application of chemicals, particularly fertilizers, was common with approximately half the respondents; and more than 40 percent of respondents were willing to pay lawn-care professionals to look after their yards. Lawns were also perceived to be the landscaping style most acceptable to neighbours. Thus, given the ubiquitousness of lawns in urban residential environments, the presence of lawns not only represents the yard design preferences of homeowners, but is part of deeply entrenched societal norms. <br /><br /> With assistance from the media and advertisements, these implicit societal norms were found to influence household attitudes and preferences towards what is dubbed 'lawn-scaping'. As confirmation of these subtle norms, more than 60 percent of respondents in both survey years agreed that 'a yard has to have a lawn'. However, these landscaping norms are also explicitly established in municipal property regulations and lot-maintenance by-laws. Hence, the lawn landscape is implicitly linked with social norms and explicitly articulated in legal agreements, making it the unquestioned standard of landscaping styles. It is concluded that a change in local policies and regulations, along with greater education and awareness, will lay the foundation for more alternative styles of landscaping within urban residential areas.

Parasitic wasps constitute one of the last remaining frontiers in the charting of animal diversity. The Braconidae is the second most species-rich family of parasitic wasps; the world fauna has been estimated at 40 000 species and the Swedish fauna is believed to include a little more than 2 000 species, 1 200 of which are currently documented. This thesis is a contribution to the rapidly increasing knowledge of braconid diversity. In paper I, a new gregarious parasitoid, Meteorus acerbiavorus sp. nov. (Braconidae: Eupohrinae), is described from specimens reared from the cocoons of the butterfly Acerbia alpina (Quensel) (Lepidoptera, Arctiidae) in northwestern Finnish Lapland. Based on a molecular phylogenetic analysis, the new species is shown to belong to the M. rubens species group. In the second paper, the Western Palearctic fauna of the tribe is revised, seven new species are described and a key to the Western Palearctic species is presented. Two molecular markers, 28S and COI, are used to study phylogenetic relationships in the tribe. The molecular results showed that the Meteorini fall into four well supported clades. The results also reveal a considerable cryptic species diversity. The third paper deals with distributional, phenological and in many cases rearing data from nearly 2 500 specimens (44 species) of the Meteorini in the collection of the National Museums of Scotland (NMS), Edinburgh. Patterns in the breadth of host ranges are discussed in relation to a reiterated speciation hypothesis. Paper IV examines the phylogenetic relationships of the entire subfamily Euphorinae based upon four gene regions (18S, CAD, 28S D2, and COI). A revised classification of the Euphorinae is proposed that recognizes 55 genera and 14 tribes. Our study shows that early members of the Euphorinae were parasitoids of coleopteran larvae, with a host shift to larval Lepidoptera, adult or immature hosts in the Hemiptera, Hymenoptera, Neuroptera, Orthoptera and Psocoptera. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: In press. Paper 4: Manuscript.</p>