The Adoption and Attachment Representations Study

Background to Study

The Adoption and Attachment Representations Research Project investigated the development of attachment relationships in children who were previously maltreated and who have recently been adopted.

The study represented the first of its kind in its use of state of the art measures to assess attachment representations in both parents and children.

This study began in January 1995 with funding from The Glass-House Trust and The Tedworth Charitable Trust with further funding received from the Headley Trust. It was completed in XXXXX. Click here to read about the follow-up study currently underway.

The study also represented a joint venture between the Adoption Service at Coram Family (Jeanne Kaniuk), the Anna Freud Centre (Dr Miriam Steele) and the Department of Psychological Medicine at Great Ormond Street Hospital (Dr Jill Hodges).

Each of the principal investigators brought a unique area of expertise to the study, which represented a cross-fertilisation of related but distinct practices, and methodology.

The aim of the study was to examine the characteristics of both the prospective adopters of 'hard to place' children and the children themselves using interview techniques that had, up until that point, been utilised successfully in developmental psychology but had yet to be applied systematically to the work of assessment and placement in adoption.

The Sample

The group of 63 children in the 'prospective' group of adopters of hard to place children were contrasted with a second group of 48 children, who were adopted before their first birthday, but who were between the ages of 4 and 8 years at the start of the project.

In this way, it was possible not only to compare the families on the range of assessments described, but also to address the issue of 'late' versus 'early' adoption.

Initially, we recruited exclusively adopters from Coram Family but have now included others from different agencies in the UK including Chester Diocese Adoption Society (CDAS).

Assessments used in the Research:

Pre-Placement

Adult Attachment Interview

The initial phase of the study involved interviewing prospective adopters, who had been approved to adopt a 'hard to place' child (so termed because of their adverse histories of neglect and maltreatment).

Both mothers and fathers were interviewed, which made this quite a unique inclusion in the study, since there had previously been no studies that had addressed the important issue of how fathers may contribute to the attachment process for children whom they adopt.

The main assessment of the adopters was an interview consisting of questions and probes about the thoughts and feelings about their own attachment history using the Adult Attachment Interview.

This interview, which was developed by Professor Mary Main and her colleagues at Berkeley University, has been shown to be a reliable and valid measure of the degree to which adults have 'come to terms' with their childhood history.

By carefully studying the narrative accounts adults give in response to a semi-structured interview, the quality of the representations that adults have of their childhood are rated as either secure, dismissing of attachment relationships, or overly pre-occupied with them. The interviews are also rated for the extent to which the individual has successfully resolved past traumatic losses and or abusive experiences.

As recent work in the field of attachment has confirmed, how adults think and feel about their experience of parent-child relationships during their own childhood is strongly related to the quality of the attachment relationship which develops with their own children.

This area had been widely researched on biologically related parents and children. Social workers had traditionally assessed adopters by other means, but this study was the first time that the Adult Attachment Interview was used to investigate the impact of the adult's attachment representations on non-biologically related families.

Click here to read The use of the Adult Attachment Interview: Implications for assessment in Adoption and Foster Care by M. Steele, J. Kaniuk, J. Hodges, C. Haworth, and S. Huss.

Post-Placement

Once the children had been placed with adoptive parents, the children and parents were invited to participate in an assessment of the child. The age of the children included in the study was from 4 to 8 years of age at placement.

Story Stems

The core of the assessment was to ask the children to respond to a set of story stems, where they were given the beginning of a 'story' highlighting everyday scenarios with an inherent dilemma.

Children were then asked "to show me and tell me what happens next?" This allowed some assessment of the child's expectations and perceptions of family roles, attachments and relationships, without asking the child direct questions about their family, adoptive or biological, which might cause them conflict or anxiety.

We developed a rating scheme and manual for coding both the verbal and non-verbal accounts for a range of areas important to our understanding of the internal worlds of these children.

These included, for instance, the degree to which the child tended to be able to acknowledge distress or defensively to deny that it existed. Did they represent adult figures as helpful and sources of comfort, or frightening or rejecting?

The set of story stems included ones developed by Jill Hodges as part of her work at the Child Care Consultation team at Great Ormond Street.

The full story stem battery included a core set formulated by workers in developmental psychology interested in aspects of children mental representations of self and the important 'others' with whom they related.

Prior to this project, research had shown that children's response to these story stems reflected both current and past features of their family life. Furthermore, the study of children's mental representations of self, parents and relationships through the use of narrative stem techniques had previously become developed as a systematic area of research, but had not yet been applied to children at the point of adoptive placement.

Such techniques offered a sensitive way of investigating children's experience of troubled and painful attachment histories prior to placement. These histories provided the child's initial powerful influence on the developing relationship.

Other Child Measures

We used a co-construction task designed to capture something of the nature of the parent-child relationship from actual interactions between the parent and child.

This assessment involved both parent and child being asked "to build something together using as many blocks as they possibly can."

This measure highlighted important features of the developing attachment relationship such as parental sensitivity.

We also assessed the child's self perceptions/self esteem and cognitive abilities.

Social workers provided us with information about these children's backgrounds prior to placement, including the number of foster homes, the amount of abuse, the type of abuse (physical, neglect, sexual) and information relating to the biological parents.

Parent Interview

At the same time as the story stem assessment, parents were interviewed using a modification of a parenting interview we now call the Experience of Parenting Interview.

This measure was designed to capture the parent's representation of the child. By comparing the first of these with the follow-up interviews, we tracked the process of the developing attachment relationship from the parent's perspective.

Other Measures of Parents

The "Attachment Representation and Adoption" study also included an extensive range of widely used measures of parental characteristics, quality of the marital relationship, parents' personality characteristics, their general health, parenting stress, and their own perceptions of their child's behaviour (using Child Behaviour Checklists and Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaires)

In addition, we used information from teachers also relating to their perceptions of the children's behaviour.