This dissertation represented an initial effort to model spousal family purchase decision behavior in terms of spousal coercion propensity. Two major issues concerning how spouses resolve conflicts were investigated: (1) What are the spousal behavioral interactions in household conflict resolution processes? (2) What are the temporal aspects of spousal family decision behaviors? It was hypothesized that spouses tend to not reciprocate their partners' uses of coercive influence strategies in a decision, given their avoidance of conflict. Also, spouses who used more power in the past tend to use less power in order to maintain equity in the long-term marital relationship. It was also hypothesized that spousal coercion propensity are contingent upon marital power, love, and preference intensity. Marital power and preference intensity are positively related to spousal coercion propensity while love predicts weaker coercive decision behavior. Consistently, it was proposed that coercive influence strategies are more effective in the short run, given the spouses' conflict avoidance and sense of equity in marriage. Thus, spouses who used coercive strategies are more satisfied with the decision outcome but less satisfied with the decision process. A dynamic simultaneous equations model (DSE) was developed to test the major hypotheses of this dissertation. The model was calibrated by means of an Autoregressive Two-Stage Least Square (A2SLS) approach. MANOVAs and a set of binary logistic regressions and linear multiple regressions were used to test the other hypotheses. The empirical study involving a random sample provided adequate support for the model. The implications of the findings, theoretical and managerial alike, limitations of the study, and future research directions were discussed. / Ph. D.

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) is a social assistance program which aims for investing in human capital by enabling families under risk of poverty to send their children to school and to benefit from health services regularly. CCT aims for decreasing poverty by means of cash transfers in the short run and aims for investing in children&rsquo / s human capital by providing basic preventative health care, regular school attendance and nutrition in the long run. Under the state of these aims, beginning from 1990s, more than 20 countries in the world started their own CCT program by the mediation or leadership of World Bank. CCT program in Turkey started so as to decrease the adverse effects of economic crisis in 2001 within the Social Risk Mitigation Project which was financially supported by the World Bank loan and constituted under the Social Assistance and Solidarity Foundation. CCT program in Turkey has been adopted by poor families in recent years, and demands and overall payments within the program have been increased significantly in a consideration of years. The need for examining and predicting the increase in these demands scientifically / and considering the fact that CCT is being applied over 20 countries, and such a study being never done before made this study necessary. In this thesis study, the change of CCT applications and number of beneficiary household over time were modeled using multivariate time series models according to geographical regions. Using the vector autoregressive models with exogenous variables (VARX), the forecasts were obtained for the number of CCT applications and beneficiary households in the future.