Helping Children Find a Home that Offers Safety, Stability, and Love

The researcher wanted to look closely to see if preferences of adoptive parents, such as a particular race, age, or gender of the adoptee, helped or hindered the process of adoption. Gathering research, based on previous studies, the researcher was able to compare and contrast, to see if there are any patterns regarding adoptive parent preferences. There was a hole in the literature in regards to the preference of gender. This was a quantitative descriptive study completed by Providence College students, using a Likert-like style instrument. The main findings in the research was the statistically significant relationship of the values of the variable race and age, based on their preference of an adoptee. Implications for further research, would be that more studies should be done to identify other variables affecting the decline in adoption, and ways to successfully move forward from this decline

The IRB as Gatekeeper: Effects on Research with Children and Youth

Gatekeepers play an important role in research conducted with children and youth. Although qualitative researchers frequently discuss institutional and individual gatekeepers, such as schools and parents, little attention has been paid to the role that Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) play in determining who is allowed to research particular populations and the ramifications of these decisions for findings involving children and youth. In order to examine this role, we compare negotiations of two researchers working on separate projects with similar populations with the IRB of a large Midwestern university. In both cases, it is likely that board members used their own personal experience and expertise in making assumptions about the race, social class, and gender of the researchers and their participants. The fact that these experiences are supported by findings across a wide range of IRBs highlights the extent to which qualitative research with children is changed (or even prevented) by those with little knowledge of typical qualitative methodologies and the cultural contexts in which research takes place. While those such as principals, teachers, and parents who are traditionally recognized as gatekeepers control access to specific locations, their denial of access only requires researchers to seek other research sites. IRBs, in contrast, control whether researchers are able to conduct research at any site. Although they wield considerably more control over research studies than typical gatekeepers, the fact that they are housed in the institutions at which academic researchers work also means that we can play a role in their improvement

University-State Child Welfare Training Partnerships: The Challenge of Matching Dollar Contributions

Universities are uniquely positioned to provide the very best training opportunities to public child welfare workers. However, university–child welfare agency training partnerships require a significant commitment of time and resources by university personnel at a time of extensive state cuts to public higher education. This national survey of university partnership administrators found significant differences among university respondents involving length of the contractual relationship, matching dollar requirements, and overall satisfaction with the training partnership

Patent Office Cohorts

Concerns regarding low-quality patents and inconsistent decisions prompted Congress to enact the first major patent reform act in over sixty years and likewise spurred the Supreme Court to take a renewed interest in substantive patent law. Because little compelling empirical evidence exists as to what features affect the patent office’s granting behavior, policymakers have been trying to fix the patent system without understanding the root causes of its dysfunction. This Article aims to fill at least part of this gap by examining one factor that may affect patent examiners’ grant rates throughout their tenures: the year in which they were hired by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). An examiner may develop a general examination “style” in the critical early stages of her career that persists even in the face of changes in application quality or patent allowance culture at the agency. To the extent initial hiring environments influence a newly hired examiner’s practice style, variations in such initial conditions suggest examiners of different hiring cohorts may follow distinct, enduring pathways with their examination practices. Consistent with this prediction, we find strong evidence that the year an examiner was hired has a lasting effect on her granting patterns over the course of her career. Moreover, we find that the variation in the granting patterns of different PTO cohorts aligns with observed fluctuations in the initial conditions faced by such cohorts. By documenting the existence of cohort effects and by demonstrating the importance of initial environments in explaining certain long-term outcomes, this analysis holds various implications for patent policy and the administrative state more generally

Is the Time Allocated to Review Patent Applications Inducing Examiners to Grant Invalid Patents?: Evidence from Micro-Level Application Data

We explore how examiner behavior is altered by the time allocated for reviewing patent applications. Insufficient examination time may hamper examiner search and rejection efforts, leaving examiners more inclined to grant invalid applications. To test this prediction, we use application-level data to trace the behavior of individual examiners over the course of a series of promotions that carry with them reductions in examination-time allocations. We find evidence demonstrating that such promotions are associated with reductions in examination scrutiny and increases in granting tendencies, as well as evidence that those additional patents being issued on the margin are of below-average quality

The Failed Promise of User Fees: Empirical Evidence from the United States Patent and Trademark Office

In an attempt to shed light on the impact of user-fee financing structures on the behavior of administrative agencies, we explore the relationship between the funding structure of the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and its examination practices. We suggest that the PTO’s reliance on prior grantees to subsidize current applicants exposes the Agency to a risk that its obligatory costs will surpass incoming fee collections. When such risks materialize, we hypothesize, and thereafter document, that the PTO will restore financial balance by extending preferential examination treatment—i.e., higher granting propensities and/or shorter wait times—to some technologies over others

Procrastination in the Workplace: Evidence from the U.S. Patent Office

Despite much theoretical attention to the concept of procrastination and much exploration of this phenomenon in laboratory settings, there remain few empirical investigations into the practice of procrastination in real world contexts, especially in the workplace. In this paper, we attempt to fill these gaps by exploring procrastination among U.S. patent examiners. We find that nearly half of examiners’ first substantive reports are completed immediately prior to the operable deadlines. Moreover, we find a range of additional empirical markers to support that this “end-loading” of reviews results from a model of procrastination rather than various alternative time-consistent models of behavior. In one such approach, we take advantage of the natural experiment afforded by the Patent Office’s staggered implementation of its telecommuting program, a large-scale development that we theorize might exacerbate employee self-control problems due to the ensuing reduction in direct supervision. Supporting the procrastination theory, we estimate an immediate spike in application end-loading and other indicia of procrastination upon the onset of telecommuting. Finally, contributing to a growing empirical literature over the efficiency of the patent examination process, we assess the consequences of procrastination for the quality of the reviews completed by the affected examiners. This analysis suggests that the primary harm stemming from procrastination is delay in the ultimate application process, with rushed reviews completed at deadlines resulting in the need for revisions in subsequent rounds of review. Our findings imply that nearly 1/6 of the annual growth in the Agency’s much-publicized backlog may be attributable to examiner procrastination

Are There as Many Trademark Offices as Trademark Examiners?

Federal trademark-registration rights have grown in import, and trademark owners have taken notice. In the fiscal year of 2018, over 660,000 federal trademark registration applications were filed with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (“Trademark Office”), representing a 60 percent increase from a decade prior. Yet despite the fact that there is growing concern that the Trademark Office is routinely issuing inconsistent trademark determinations, systematic empirical studies of the administrative process of obtaining federal registration rights are virtually nonexistent. This Article begins to close this gap by conducting the first large-scale study of trademark officials, known as trademark-examining attorneys, who make the initial determination on whether to accept or decline a federal trademark registration. Utilizing a novel dataset comprising over 7.8 million trademark applications, this Article examines the extent to which trademark-examining attorneys’ determinations differ from one another. We find substantial heterogeneity in Trademark Office outcomes. Trademark-examining attorneys have wildly divergent publication rates and registration rates even while controlling for a range of characteristics of the applications. The duration of time an application is before the Trademark Office also varies considerably among trademark-examining attorneys as does whether a filed opposition is sustained

The Failed Promise of User Fees: Empirical Evidence from the United States Patent and Trademark Office

In an attempt to shed light on the impact of user-fee financing structures on the behavior of administrative agencies, we explore the relationship between the funding structure of the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and its examination practices. We suggest that the PTO’s reliance on prior grantees to subsidize current applicants exposes the Agency to a risk that its obligatory costs will surpass incoming fee collections. When such risks materialize, we hypothesize, and thereafter document, that the PTO will restore financial balance by extending preferential examination treatment—i.e., higher granting propensities and/or shorter wait times—to some technologies over others