In a regional sample of 620 families, the four items of the Kansas Family Life Satisfaction Scale demonstrated adequate internal consistency reliability and limited construct validity. As with other satisfaction scales, however, the scale did not manifest a normal distribution of responses. The scale's social desirability characteristics were not assessed and remain unknown.

In this study of current and former female reservists and National Guard members from the state of Ohio, veterans who were older, who had more years of military service, who had participated in the Gulf War, who were Euro-Americans, who were or had been married, and who were higher in rank tended to have more valid addresses and higher response rates, thus biasing sample outcomes in those directions. Educational attainment, branch of service, component of service, and residential stability appeared to be less important, although some significant findings were noted. Implications for further research on Desert Storm are discussed. In general, those veterans who might have been expected to have a greater investment in U.S. society were more likely to respond to a survey concerning Desert Storm era military service and its aftermath.

The “marital conventionalization” argument set forth by Edmonds, Withers, and Dibatista (1972) claims that empirical relationships observed between measures of religiosity and marital satisfaction are spurious artifacts of the common contamination of such measures with social desirability/acquiescence response bias, identified by Edmonds (1967) as “marital conventionalization” and measured through the Marital Conventionalization Scale (MCS). More recently, Glenn and Weaver (1978) have adopted the “marital conventionalization” argument to discount the importance of the substantial, positive associations they observed between a religious variable and a measure of marital happiness. Data from two Kansas samples of husbands and wives were analyzed to evaluate the validity of the “marital conventionalization” argument. Results indicate that religiosity is an important predictor of marital satisfaction, at least in some samples, even among subjects who do not respond in a “conventionalizing” way to an abbreviated version of the MCS. Therefore, the limitations of the “marital conventionalization” argument should be considered prior to discounting empirical relationships found between religiosity and marital satisfaction as mere artifacts of social desirability or acquiescence response biases, as measured by the MCS.

For adolescents in foster care progress towards achieving the developmental tasks of adolescence may be more challenging because of the additional stress of being separated from their birth families. Examined in this study is the influence of identification with birth family on the ability of 116 youth in foster care, in a midwestern state, to develop a self-identity and positive self-esteem.Although children in foster care face the same developmental challenges as other children, their struggles for mastery take place within the context of an overwhelming emotional stress--separation from parents (Geiser, 1973). To facilitate a youth's ability to live successfully upon leaving the foster care system, adequate achievement towards accomplishing the developmental tasks of adolescence is necessary. It is adolescence, then, that provides a transitional period to adulthood (Timberlake & Verdieck, 1987) and a time of preparation for life which if not successfully completed could mean failure in one's adult life and successful completion could mean happiness as an adult

A 1999 study of United Kingdom servicemembers by Unwin, et al. recently found significant relationships between anthrax and other vaccinations, reactions to those vaccines, and later health problems for male current or former active military Gulf War veterans. Likewise, in 2000 Steele and in 1998 Gilroy found possible adverse effects of vaccinations on Gulf War veterans. However, the role of such vaccinations remains controversial; more recent government reports continue to dispute the existence of any data that might reflect adversely on the role of vaccinations on the health of Gulf War veterans. To address this controversy, the current study assessed similar relationships for over 900 Reserve Component Gulf War Era veterans from Ohio and nearby states. Gulf War veterans were more likely to report poorer health than non-Gulf veterans. Female veterans were more likely to report mild or severe reactions to vaccines than male veterans. Those veterans who received anthrax vaccine reported more reactions to vaccines than those who did not receive anthrax vaccine. Declines in long-term subjective health were associated with receipt of anthrax vaccine by Gulf War veterans but not for those who did not deploy to the Gulf, although few of the latter received anthrax vaccine. Regardless of deployment status, veterans who reported more severe reactions to vaccines were more likely to report declines in subjective health. Female veterans reported poorer health during the Gulf War than did male veterans, but sex was not related to veterans' reports of subjective health at subsequent times. It is recommended that servicemembers who experience severe reactions to anthrax vaccine be medically reevaluated before receiving further anthrax vaccine and that careful follow-ups be conducted of those receiving the vaccine currently, in accordance with Nass's 1999 recommendations. We also recommend that safer alternatives to thimerosal (a mercury sodium salt, 50% mercury) be used to preserve all vaccines.