Adolescents Leaving Parental Home: Psychosocial Correlates and Implications for Conservation

To disclose the interplay between psychosocial antecedents of adolescents’ decisions to leave their parental home in an ecologically sensitive region, we used structural equation modeling to analyze data from in-person interviews of members of 220 households in Wolong Nature Reserve for giant pandas (China). We further divided our data into two sub-samples by gender to test the hypothesis that model parameters differ for females and males. Our findings indicate that parental attitudes/behavior, peer behavior, and perceived availability of material/non-material resources play a critical role in adolescents’ home-leaving decisions. This study demonstrates an important link between psychosocial factors and biodiversity conservation.