A great deal of research has been conducted in the last three decades to find the determinants of technology usage and adoption. Numerous models have been developed in the United States and other developed countries to enhance the understanding of this issue. However, two main questions remain as to what extent these models and conclusions based on their past usage can be applied to other countries, particularly less developed nations, and to what degree social influence affects consumers' decisions across cultures. Recently, Kulviwat et al. (2007) proposed a new model - Consumer Acceptance of Technology (CAT) - that was shown to significantly improve the prediction of intentions to adopt high-tech products compared to the immensely popular Technology Acceptance Model (TAM; Davis 1989) by integrating cognitive and affective factors. This study extends the CAT model by adding social constructs in order to account for the effects from others rather than from one's own thoughts and feelings. Because of the addition of social influences, this modified model was named CATS. The objectives of this dissertation were threefold. The first objective was to investigate the impact of social influence on adoption of technological innovations by including three social constructs: social influence, susceptibility to normative influence, and susceptibility to informational influence. The second objective was to examine cognitive, affective, and social influence in three countries (The United States, State of Kuwait, and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) in order to determine if their relative roles in predicting attitudes and intentions are stable or if they vary in some predictable way. The third objective was to examine the effect of an extremely important cultural dimension, individualism/collectivism, on the relationships in the model. In general, the results provided empirical support for CATS across cultures by using structural equation modeling and path analysis. More specifically, the findings confirm what was found in previous studies about the important roles of cognition (percieved usefulness) and affect (pleasure, arousal, and dominance). Additionally, this research showed that social (social influence) also has a significant, direct, and positive effect on attitude toward adopting technology innovations. Also, as expected from previous studies, attitude had a significant, positive, and direct effect on adoption intention. Finally, the role of a culture's individualism/collectivism on the relationships in the model was surprising. The only factors that were significantly moderated by individualism/collectivism were related to affect: pleasure and dominance. This new finding suggests that consumers in individualistic cultures are more likely than consumers in collectivistic cultures to have their attitudes shaped by how enjoyable an innovation is and how much more "in control" it makes them feel. Overall, the analysis showed that the CATS model fit the data best. This means the incorporation of cognition, affect, and social into a model fit the data better than cognition (TAM) or cognition and affect (CAT) alone. These findings have valuable implications for marketing theory, methodology, and practice.

In this Thesis I will examine technology adoption by analyzing how different organizations come to interpret a technology as a specific kind of innovation based on a certain set of criteria. The kind of innovation an organization interprets a technology to be effects how quickly the organization will adopt that technology. To analyze how organizations come to interpret technologies as a specific kind of innovation I will construct a model. I will utilize the Actor-Network Theory from Science and Technology Studies as the framework to combined theories regarding technology adoption from other disciplines. This new model of technology adoption will be able to address the individual weakness of each theory that I use, and at the same time build on the strengths of the Actor-Network Theory. I will conclude my thesis by testing my new model using an event study from econometrics. Using the surrogate measure of the stock market to represent consumers, the event study will allow me to gauge if the kind of innovation a technology is interpreted as affects the rate of its adoption. / Master of Science

The purpose of this research is to understand how violence acts as a preceding event to a change in Asian adoptees' identities. I use the word 'violence' to encompass a wide range of experiences and events including 20th-century US-Asia wars, hate crimes, mass shootings, sexual violence, bullying, microaggressions, harassment, and more. This research includes violence that is experienced on not only an interpersonal level such as direct physical and psychological violence, but also on a cultural and collective level. In trying to understand this relationship between violence and identity, I use Identity Theory to analyze the contents of eleven interviews with Asian adoptees from Korea, China and Vietnam living in the US. I found that violence influenced identity changes in four major ways: vicarious victimhood, solidarity with other minorities, racial discrimination, and exclusion by other Asians. / Master of Science / The purpose of this research is to understand how violence may influence changes in Asian adoptees' identities. This research examines violence that is experienced on not only an interpersonal level such as direct physical and psychological violence, but also on a cultural and collective level. I used Identity Theory to analyze the contents of eleven interviews with Asian adoptees from Korea, China, and Vietnam living in the US. I found that violence influenced identity changes in four major ways: in response to violence against Asians during the COVID-19 pandemic, solidarity with other minorities, racial discrimination, and exclusion by other Asians.

Transracial adoption has been a controversial form of adoption since it came into vogue in the United States in the 1950s. In 1972, The National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) established a decree stating transracial adoption was akin to cultural genocide because they were concerned that under the tutelage of White parents, Black children would not learn the skills needed to survive in a racist society. Whereas the NABSW was looking out for the well being of domestic children of color, there was no corresponding advocate for children of color adopted internationally. Recognizing that large numbers of children are adopted from Asia, racism is still an issue for people of color and not all White people are aware of the extent that racism exists in our society, I set out to learn if and how White adoptive parents of Asian born children talk about race related issues within the context of the family. This dissertation shares the insights and experiences of White parents from nine families who adopted children from Korea and the Philippines. The goal of the study was to learn if and how White parents talk to their Asian born children about racism, how comfortable and confident they feel having those conversations and who they turn to when they need help in supporting their children around race related issues. The results indicate that before children reached adolescence, the children were much more open and willing to share upsetting events with their parents. Pre-adolescent youth turned to their parents for comfort, support and guidance. During the teen years, communication between parents and children decreased thus limiting the parent's influence about imparting wisdom about how to navigate race related situations. The final chapter offers recommendations for practice, research and policy.

This master’s thesis will be discussing how nuanced experiences affects the crafting of identity among transnational and/or transracial adult adoptees raised in Sweden from an anthropological perspective.The purpose of this thesis is to show that adoptees craft their identity in numerous and complex ways, one as unique as the other. The nuanced experiences are important to underscore since the adoptee demographic is vast and it consists of multiple individuals with unique lives, and if these distinctiveness are ignored, we run the risk of depicting a flawed picture of the adoptee experience. In an attempt to avoid doing so, this thesis will use an intersection of different theoretical frameworks from previous literatureon adoption and identity, which are belonging, body, and kinning, with additional theoretical concepts on materiality to complement. This paper follows eight adoptees, who share their individual narratives that revolves around the crafting of their Swedish, Adoption, and Ethnic identity. I will bring their experiences to life by putting them in relation to each other to showcase their uniqueness. Keywords: Adoption, Belonging, Body, Kinship.

“Neighborly Adoption” examines the predominance of adoption narratives in canonical transatlantic novels and highlights their intervention in a relatively unknown and surprisingly contentious discourse on child adoption. In the 1840s and 1850s, American and British reformers, politicians, and authors were thinking through issues surrounding a growing population of abandoned children in metropolitan cities and the flourishing practice and legal codification of private adoption. While institutional care was still on the rise in this period, writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens, and Maria Susanna Cummins criticized these methods, endorsing adoption as a more appropriate model of displaced child care. While critics like Carol J. Singley and Mark C. Jerng have read nineteenth-century adoption narratives as commentaries on whom might be included or excluded from national citizenship, I argue that the adoption plot should be understood as a thoroughly transatlantic phenomenon. American and British authors whose novels were popular on both sides of the Atlantic promote and interrogate what I call “neighborly adoption,” a practice in which a local community of individuals or families collectively raise a displaced child. In these narratives, varied members of the neighborhood—single, married, male, female, poor, and rich—have beneficial and empowering relationships with the children in their community, regardless of biological relation to them. Though adoption today is largely associated with individualistic values—i.e. completing one’s family, a child’s best interest—this project reveals the collective interests at the heart of adoption in nineteenth-century transatlantic literature.

This study builds on the theory of planned behavior, institutional and innovation diffusion theories to investigate physicians' responses to introduction of electronic medical records (EMR) in large healthcare organizations. Using a case study methodology, we show that physicians' attitudes towards using EMR are influenced by their perceptions of EMR complexity, relative advantage, compatibility with professional beliefs and individual predisposition to change. Specifically, we found that EMR usability characteristics such as system interface, "navigation," "search" and "speed" are major dimensions underlying physicians' perceptions of EMR complexity. To the extent that navigating and searching for clinical results are seen as difficult, physicians' perceptions of the complexity of using EMR are enhanced, with the result of physicians forming more negative attitudes towards EMR and using EMR less. Accessibility to EMR (i.e. logging in) and availability of hardware are two emergent constructs. These factors are immediate barriers for physicians not using EMR or using EMR minimally. At the same time, these barriers contribute to impacting physicians' perceptions that EMR is difficult to use and disadvantageous (i.e. time inefficient) compared to the paper chart. Results also show that most EMR usage at Alpha is rather "shallow." Physicians tend to use data-retrieval EMR minimally, mainly to supplement the paper chart. The availability of this "competing artifact," that is much easier to use and conveniently located near a patient's room limits the extent to which physicians use EMR at Alpha. Use of an imaging EMR system (EMR3) is more committed. EMR3 is used to replace the "old way" of accessing films. Lack of accessibility and hardware barriers, the relative advantage of EMR3 and other system usability considerations contribute to physicians using this system more faithfully. As regards the question "what do physicians want?" it seems that physicians want a system that that is easy to access and simple to use but most importantly, a system that they can directly identify with, an EMR that is personally relevant. In order to promote a "deeper" level of EMR usage, the benefits of EMR need to be emphasized to physicians while any potential costs or barriers reduced or eliminated.

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