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The purpose of this paper was to use a life course approach to investigate the association between family structure histories and high school completion. Using data from a population-based data registry for the 1984 Manitoba birth cohort, we selected a sample of children born or adopted at birth into a married or cohabiting two-parent household (n = 9,493) and derived family structure histories for each child up until the age of 18. Marital disruption occurred for 1,876 children (19.8%), with 531 children (5.6%) of the total sample experiencing multiple changes in family structure. Logistic regression models showed that children who experienced marital disruption before the age of 18 were significantly less likely to complete high school than children in intact households, and that children who were younger at the time of a first change in marital status were more vulnerable than children who were older when their parents' marriage ended. Further work is needed to elucidate the pathways that link family structure histories to child outcomes.

Old sample surveys from the developing areas can be used for a number of purposes not adequately discussed in the soc sci literature. Examples from field res conducted on the Turkish bur'cy were used to describe the possibilities for secondary analysis. It was suggested that longitudinal survey res might be designed around studies performed by other investigators; the opportunities for panel & trend studies were particularly emphasized. The Turkish res was also aided by the fact that the old surveys could be utilized to estimate nonresponse bias; from 2 studies conducted in 1956 a great deal of information on nonresponse bias in 1965 was made available. Finally, the possibilities for combining data from several surveys were mentioned; from the Turkish material it becomes possible to explore the personal characteristics of admin'ors which led to a favorable or unfavorable evaluation by the villagers. AA.

In the policy environment, the news media play a powerful and influential role, determining not only what issues are on the broad policy agenda, but also how the public and politicians perceive these issues. Ensuring that reporters and editors have access to information, that is, credible and evidence-based is critical for stimulating healthy public discourse and constructive political debates. EvidenceNetwork.ca is a non-partisan web-based project that makes the latest evidence on controversial health-policy issues available to the Canadian news media. This article introduces EvidenceNetwork.ca, the benefits it offers to journalists and researchers, and the important niche it occupies in working with the news media to build a more productive dialogue around healthcare.

The authors review their 30 years' experience in determining the best research applications for routinely collected data from ministries of health, education and social services. They describe the rich research opportunities afforded by 40 years of data on health – i.e., every patient contact with hospitals, physicians, drugs and more – from the problems encountered in convincing an academic journal that meaningful findings could be culled from information collected on paying bills and tracking patients, through studies on education (enrolment, grades, standardized tests for grades 1 to 12), family characteristics (residential moves, marital formation and breakdown, number and timing of births) and social services (welfare recipients, children taken into care, protection services offered children in the family). They also detail how and why the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy was founded, and how it has continued through multiple ministerial, deputy and government changes.