Adoption is an important family structure in The United States. In 2013, more than 1.7 million children were adopted including domestic, International, and foster care adoptions in the U.S. I examine the perceived and received support from grandparents to adoptive families and the impact it has on the families' lives. Qualitative methods in the form of semi-structured open-ended interviews were used to conduct 28 interviews with adoptive parents. My findings reveal that maternal grandmothers were more likely to be supportive and involved in adoptive families compared to other grandparents. Secondly, perceived support was directly mentioned or implied by every adoptive family. Third, single mothers expressed more desire for and instances of grandparent support. Fourth, the majority of grandparents who were initially hesitant or reluctant about adoption were later supportive and accepting of the adopted child(ren). Fifth, most adoptive families received and perceived support. However, some families who did not receive or perceive much support were able to find alternative support systems. Finally, verbal and emotional supports were the most reported forms of support from grandparents to adoptive families. Almost all adoptive families reported some level of emotional and/or verbal support from one or more grandparent. Future research can more thoroughly examine family outcomes from grandparent support. Looking at the other support systems adoptive families use is an additional area of future research. / Ph. D.

Public agricultural research has been conducted in Africa for decades and has generated numerous crop technologies, while little is understood on how agricultural research affects the poor and vulnerable groups such as children, and how farmers' perceptions affect their adoption decisions. This dissertation helps fill this gap with three essays on adoption and impacts of improved maize varieties in rural Ethiopia. The first essay estimates poverty impacts. Field-level treatment effects on yield and cost changes with adoption are estimated using instrumental variable techniques, with treatment effect heterogeneity fully accounted for in marginal treatment effect estimation. A backward derivation procedure is then developed within an economic surplus framework to identify the counterfactual income distribution without improved maize varieties. Poverty impacts are estimated by exploiting the differences between the observed and counterfactual income distributions. Improved maize varieties have led to 0.8-1.3 percentage drop in poverty headcount ratio and relative reductions in poverty depth and severity. However, poor producers benefit the least from adoption due to their small land holdings. The second paper assesses the impacts on child nutrition outcomes. The conceptual linkage between maize adoption and child nutrition is first established using an agricultural household model. Instrumental variable (IV) estimation suggests the overall impacts to be positive and significant. Quantile IV regressions further reveal that such impacts are largest among the most severely malnourished. By combining a decomposition procedure with estimates from a system of equations, it is found that the increase in own-produced maize consumption is the major channel such impacts occur. The third paper explores how farmers' perceptions of crop traits affects their willingness to adopt improved maize varieties. Under a random utility framework, a mixed logit procedure is implemented to model farmer's adoption intention, where perceptions of key varietal traits are first identified, and then instrumented using a control function approach to account for potential endogeneity. Perceived yield is found to be the most important trait affecting farmers' adoption intention. Further, yield perceptions among previous adopters appear to be affected by within-village peer effects rather than the real crop performance. / Ph. D.

New agricultural technologies can improve productivity to meet the increased demand for food that places pressure on agricultural production systems in developing countries. Because technological innovation is one of major factors shaping agriculture in both developing and developed countries, it is important to identify factors that help or that hinder the adoption process. Adoption analysis can assist policy makers in making informed decisions about dissemination of technologies that are under consideration. It is also important to estimate the impact of a technology. This dissertation contains three essays that estimate factors affecting integrated pest management (IPM) adoption and the impact of IPM on sweet gourd farming in Bangladesh. The first essay estimates factors that affect the timing of IPM adoption in Bangladesh. It employs duration models, fully parametric and semiparametric, and (i) compares results from different estimation methods to provide the best model for the data, and (ii) identifies factors that affect the length of time before Bangladeshi farmers adopt an agricultural technology. The paper provides two conclusions: 1) even though the non-parametric estimate of the hazard function indicated a non-monotone model such as log-normal or log-logistic, no differences are found in the sign and significance of the estimated coefficients between the non-monotone and monotone models. 2) economic factors do not directly influence the adoption decision but rather factors related to information diffusion and farmer's non-economic characteristics such as age and education. Particularly, farmer's age and education, membership in an association, training, distance of the farmer's house from local and town markets, and farmer's perception about the use of IPM affect the length of time to adoption. Farm size is the only variable closely related to economic factors that is found to be significant and it decreases the length of time to adoption. The second paper measures Bangladeshi farmers' attitudes toward risk and ambiguity using experimental data. In different sessions, the experiment allows farmers to make decisions alone and communicate with peers in groups of 3 and 6 to see how social exchanges among peers affect attitudes toward uncertainty. Combining the measured attributes to household survey data, the paper investigates the factors affecting those attributes as well as the role of risk aversion and ambiguity aversion in technology choice by farmers who: face uncertainty alone, in a group of 3, or in a group of 6. It finds that Bangladeshi farmers in the sample are mostly risk and ambiguity averse. Their risk and ambiguity aversion, moreover, differ when they face the uncertain prospects alone from when they can communicate with other peer farmers before making decisions. In addition, farmer's demographic characteristics affect both risk and ambiguity aversion. Finally, findings suggest that the roles of risk and ambiguity aversion in technology adoption depend on which measure of uncertainty behavior is incorporated in the adoption model. While risk aversion increases the likelihood of technology adoption when farmers face uncertainty alone, only ambiguity aversion matters and it reduces the likelihood of technology adoption when farmers face uncertainty in groups of three. Neither risk aversion nor ambiguity aversion matter when farmers face uncertainty in groups of six. The third paper presents an impact assessment of integrated pest management on sweet gourd in Bangladesh. It employs an instrumental variable and marginal treatment effects approach to estimate the impact of IPM on yield and cost of sweet gourd in Bangladesh. The estimation methods consider both homogeneous and heterogeneous treatment effects. The paper finds that IPM adoption has a 7% - 34% yield advantage over traditional pest management practices. Results regarding the effect of IPM adoption on cost are mixed. IPM adoption alters production costs from -1.2% cost to +42%, depending on the estimation method employed. However, most of the cost changes are not statistically significant. Therefore, while we confidently argue that the IPM adoption provides a yield advantage over non-adoption, we do not find a robust effect regarding a cost advantage of adoption. / Ph. D.

Yes / This deliberately dual perspective paper seeks to deepen our understanding of the engagement of SMEs in hosted enterprise applications in the UK. The emergence and development of the ASP sector has attracted much interest and highly optimistic forecasts for revenues. The paper starts by considering ICT adoption by SMEs in general before reviewing the provision of hosted enterprise applications in the US and UK (market perspective). The study is extended by qualitative empirical data collected by semi-structured interviews with SME users of hosted enterprise applications (user perspective) and subsequent analysis in order to develop the key findings and conclusions. From an SME user perspective the key findings to emerge from the study include: i) confirmation that ICT infrastructure was no longer a barrier to adoption, ii) the pragmatic approach taken to security issues, iii) the use of both multiple information systems and multiple service providers, iv) the financial attractiveness of the rental model and v) the intention to continue or extend the use of hosted applications. It also highlights the opportunity for gaining competitive advantage by using hosted enterprise applications to reduce costs. There are very few empirical studies of hosted applications which take deliberately market and SME user perspectives - this paper makes an important contribution in this emerging field.

Yes / Against a background of the low engagement of SMEs in e-business this paper investigates the emergence of, and potential for, critical e-applications defined as `an e-business application, promoted by a trusted third party, which engages a significant number of SMEs by addressing an important shared business concern within an aggregation.¿ By a review of secondary data and empirical investigation with service providers and other intermediaries the research shows that such applications can facilitate the e-business engagement of SMEs. There are three key findings, namely: the emergence of aggregation specific e-business applications; the emergence of collaboratively based `one to many¿ business models; and the importance of trusted third parties in the adoption of higher complexity e-business applications by SMEs. Significantly this work takes a deliberately provider perspective and complements the already considerable literature on SME IT adoption from a user and network perspective. In terms of future research the importance of a better conceptual understanding of the impact of complexity on the adoption of IT by SMEs is highlighted.

Yes / Although the success adoption of e-government contingent upon citizens' trust and their willingness to use it, little consideration has been paid to explore the adoption of e-government from citizens' trust perspective. This paper provides a critical and systematic review of the current literature on citizens’ trust in e-government, with a particular focus on the most critical factors influencing citizens’ trust in respect of the adoption of e-government. The extant literature was identified through six electronic databases, from 2000 to 2014. Academic articles were reviewed if they contained a relevant discussion of the antecedents or factors influencing citizens’ trust in e-government adoption. The findings of this review reveal that several studies have been conducted in the area of trust in e-government (particularly trust in government and trust in the internet) with limited consideration to citizen’s aspects of trust (such as personality, culture, gender, experience, education level, beliefs and value systems). Based on the findings of the review, a conceptual framework is proposed by developing the updated DeLone and McLean IS Success Model to establish a framework which presents the antecedents of trust in e-government adoption.

Yes / The adoption and diffusion of electronic government is often impeded by many social and individual factors relating to citizens. In this respect, intermediaries have emerged as a new model for delivering e-government services to overcome such obstacles. This study aims to examine the role of intermediaries in facilitating e-government adoption and diffusion using a survey based empirical study of 502 participants in Madinah City in Saudi Arabia. An extended UTAUT model is used as the theoretical basis utlising trust in the Internet and Intermediaries. The results of this study show that there are significant relationships among the factors that influence intention to use e-government, namely, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and trust of intermediary. In addition, the findings show that there is a significant relationship between facilitating conditions and usage behaviour proving that intermediaries can influence adoption of e-government services.

Yes / In the modern business era, mobile commerce (m-commerce) is changing the way the business is conducted using the Internet. However, the prominence of m-commerce among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK is minimal. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the existing literature and to extend the research surrounding the barriers that prevent the adoption of m-commerce amongst SMEs. The study uses an Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) and MICMAC approach for guiding and helping managers of SMEs. Data was collected from an expert participant group each of whom had extensive knowledge of m-commerce. The findings represent the unstable nature of variables in the context of their impact on each other, their relationships, and themselves. The listed factors in the proposed framework and the interrelationships between them highlight the multi-dimensional element of m-commerce adoption prevention. This observation proves criticality of analysing data as a collective entity rather than viewing the barriers in isolation. The findings also indicated ‘perceived risk’ being a key barrier that demonstrates how personal opinions of the concept of adoption can have a great significance on the outcome and whether other variables will come into effect.

Yes / Sluggish adoption of emerging electronic government (eGov) applications continues to be a problem across developed and developing countries. This research tested the nine alternative theoretical models of technology adoption in the context of an eGov system using data collected from citizens of four selected districts in the state of Bihar in India. Analysis of the models indicates that their performance is not up to the expected level in terms of path coefficients, variance in behavioural intention, or the fit indices of the models. In response to the underperformance of the alternative theoretical models to explain the adoption of an eGov system, this research develops a unified model of electronic government adoption and tests it using the same data. The results indicate that the proposed research model outperforms all alternative models of technology adoption by explaining 77 % of variance in behavioural intention, with acceptable values of fit indices and significant relationships between each pair of hypothesised factors.

Yes / The key objective of this study is to propose and examine a conceptual model that best explains the key factors influencing Jordanian customers’ intentions and adoption of Internet banking. The conceptual model proposed was based on the extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2). This was further extended by adding perceived risk as an external factor. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was conducted to analyse the data collected from the field survey questionnaires administered to a convenience sample of Jordanian banking customers. The results show that behavioural intention is significantly influenced by performance expectancy, effort expectancy, hedonic motivation, price value and perceived risk; however, social influence does not have a significant impact on behavioural intention. This study offers Jordanian banks some guidelines for designing and marketing such channel in order to enhance their acceptance by their customers.