Science Fair Project Finally Done

I can’t believe it - Alex has worked so hard on it and I have helped and put so many hours into this - I hope he does well next weekend. The actual science fair is Saturday March 8th. I have cut and pasted his abstract, which is just a little summary of the project. But I will try to upload the file which has his research paper on it for those hardy people that want to read everything. I will also try to upload the graphs representing the data.

Most children in orphanages around the world want to be adopted and many of them will not get a chance. I hope people will see this project, learn from it, and be inspired to adopt a child. I designed a survey to ask internationally adopted children about their experiences during and after adoption. My hypothesis was basically correct with all respondents replying 83% feeling good about their adoption and 17% neutral or bad about their adoption. This can be important for adoptive parents to understand that all children are not as excited about adoption as the parents might want them to be. It would be helpful to understand the child’s feelings and try to find out why they are unhappy

Overall 28% respondents said yes to adoption because they felt they had no choice. Even more interesting was the breakdown of choice in adoption by age category. Ages 6 and under reported 75% feeling they had no choice, ages 7-11 had only 25% feeling they had no choice, and with the over age 12 category, 0% felt they had no choice. For adoptive parents, this is important for them to understand the feelings of choice, so they can take more time with children, especially little ones and try to help them understand.

The most important finding of my study was that there was a significant difference in the children’s feelings about adoption before and after coming to America. For all respondents, 56% felt good about adoption before coming to America, while 83% felt good about adoption after coming to America. This was found to be statistically significant at the 95% level of confidence. Before being adopted, children are scared and not understanding about the changes in their lives, but after they have been here for a while, they understand how their lives changed for the better. For adoptive parents, don’t feel too bad in the beginning because everyone will go through these phases, and ultimately things will get better, and the child will feel happier.

Thanks everyone who helped and supported Alex on this project.