Kinship adoption and the associated outcomes among children and their adoptive families
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Kinship adoption and the associated outcomes among children and their adoptive families
Source: Ryan, S. D., Hinterlong, J., Hegar, R.L., & Johnson, L.B. (2010). Kin adopting kin: In the best interest of the children? Children and Youth Services Review, 32(12), 1631-1639.
Reviewed by: Dillon T. Browne
Kinship adoption is becoming increasingly common in the U.S.
child welfare system, where roughly 25% of children adopted from
public foster care enter kinship arrangements. However, the
majority of kinship research has focused solely on foster care
placements. The authors of this study sought to describe the
characteristics and experiences of children and adopters in kin
versus non-kin arrangements, and determine if a pre-existing
kinship relationship predicts various adoption outcomes.
Data were used from the first cycle of the Florida Adoption Project
(FAP), which investigates the markers of successful adoption among
parents who adopt children from Florida鈥檚 public child welfare
system. Of the initial sampling frame (N=6,782), 1,694 (25%)
adoptive parents returned survey measures on 2,382 (21.8%)
children, and 397 (16.7%) of these children were in kin
placements.
Kin adopters tended to be older, to be white, to have lower
education and income, to head smaller households, and to care for
fewer children. Children in kin families tended to be female, to be
younger, and to have fewer lifetime placements, though their
adoption finalization time tended to be greater. In terms of their
attitudes towards the adoption process, kin adopters provided a
more negative assessment of family functioning, though they were
more likely to indicate that they would adopt the same child again,
and reported a more positive relationship with the adopted child.
Even when controlling for a number of confounding variables using
tobit regression, kin adoption was significantly associated with an
increased willingness to adopt the same child again, higher
adoption satisfaction, and less positive family functioning.
It is possible that lower family functioning among kin adoptions
has to do with a pressure to adopt the child even though the family
is not equipped with the resources to cope with the change. Another
possibility is that kin adopters are indicating the impact of the
adoption process on the extended family, as opposed the immediate
adopted family. Nevertheless, it appears that kin status is
associated with a number of positive adoption outcomes.
Methodological notes:
The generalizability of the presented findings may be limited due
to a low response rate, although this is not uncommon for adoption
studies. Another limitation pertains to the validity of the
single-item measures for some of the dependent variables (adoption
satisfaction, adopt again, and family impact). Ceiling effects were
operative, where study participants frequently endorsed the most
extreme response option. However, authors took measures to
statistically account for this response pattern. Another limitation
pertains to the reliance on self-report, within-informant data
which can contribute to artificial and inflated associations due to
the shared method variance bias (i.e., only one respondent
reporting on predictor and outcome measures can cause associations
to be observed due to an individual鈥檚 response style across
different measures). Nevertheless, this study presents strong
findings from a large adoption sample that is fairly similar to the
general population, despite the low response rate.
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