Motivations and Decision-Making Processes of Internationally Adopted Children
Alex Gardiner
5349 228th Avenue SE,
Issaquah, WA 98029
Homeschooled
Grade 10
Table Of Contents
Introduction 3
Background Research 5
Methods 6
Results 8
Conclusion 12
References 14
Introduction
This science fair project is about children that have been adopted from other countries into America. I came up with the idea because I thought that very few people studied adopted children. I think that the topic of international adoption is not as widely discussed and many people don’t even know there are children in other countries that need families. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of attention given to younger and older children that need families.
I was adopted at the age of 14 from Ukraine and I thought it would be interesting to study what other children felt about being adopted. I personally felt really strange coming to America the first time. There were so many things I didn’t know and then once I got used to my new family and learned the language, it got better. I am interested in what other children feel about the process of being adopted.
I want to be a psychologist and I feel like this study will be a good start. I want to understand people better as I feel it is very interesting to know what others are thinking and feeling. Other children might not have wanted to be adopted and I want to explore the reasons why they said that. The reasons are the most important things to know about these children to pass onto other families considering adoption.
Also, I feel that studying the reasons and motivations behind their decisions is very interesting. I am interested in knowing what the children have to say about my project. I will be able to tell about children that feel neutral about the situation, or maybe are very excited about adoption. Also, it is important to find out about children that felt like they had no choice in the adoption decision.
For my experiment, I developed my hypothesis from my own personal experience. I think everyone will say they wanted to be adopted because they want a family. I feel about 80% will say yes because they wanted to say yes, 5% will say yes because someone told them to say yes, and another 15% said yes because they feel they have no choice about being adopted.
I think that most children in orphanages want to be adopted and many of them will not get a chance. I hope many people will see this project and be inspired to adopt a child.
Background Research
International adoption numbers have been decreasing in America for the past decade or so. In 2004, there were 22,990 children adopted from foreign countries by Americans. By the time 2011 arrived, only 9,320 children were adopted from foreign countries and still the number is continuing to fall. An interesting fact is that even though other countries adopt internationally such as Spain, France, Italy, and Canada, America adopts internationally more than any other country and accounts for about 50% of all international adoptions.
One country that America used to adopt from is Russia. Recently, there have been issues with Russia, resulting in the Russian President decided to stop adoptions to America. I feel like I would do anything in my power to change this, as there are children awaiting homes in Russia. I hope many people will see this project and help support me to gain awareness of this issue and of international adoptions as a whole.
Methods
First, we researched the proper forms to use for this science fair project. I then filled them out and submitted them and received permission to go ahead with the project.
To start the project, I came up with the questionnaire to use. I sent out the questionnaire to various groups that had contact with internationally adopted children. Then, I waited to get the answers back along with the informed consents. I identified my independent and dependent variables in this project. The dependent variable I was testing is the feelings of the children about being adopted and whether they had a choice. The independent variables were their age at adoption and how long it took them to decide about being adopted.
After getting the questionnaires back, I started working on the project. First I started compiling all the numbers. I started with the age of adoption, dividing it into three categories, under age 6, ages 7 through 11, and ages 12 and older. Then, I looked at how long they were in the USA since adoption. Then I looked at the questions dealing with how long it took the children to make a decision to be adopted. These answers were divided into 4 groups; no choice, immediate decision, 1 day to 1 month, and over 1 month. Then I looked at whether the children had a good, neutral, or bad feeling about adoption both before adoption and after being in the USA for a certain amount of time.
On the questionnaire, children answered anyway they wanted to in sentences. I had to change these sentences (qualitative) into numbers (quantitative). For the time period to make a decision about whether to be adopted, I divided the answers into no choice, immediately (which I assigned a value of 1), 1 day to 1 month (which I assigned a value of 2), and over 1 month (which I assigned a value of 3). I followed the same procedure for how children felt about adoption before and after coming to America, with good feelings assigned a 1, neutral feelings assigned a 2, and bad feelings assigned a 3.
The first time through, I did this for all respondents. Then I did this for all respondents age 6 and under. Next, I separated out for ages 7-11, and last for ages over 12.
After we looked at all the groups, I went back and calculated statistics for the total group of range, average, and standard deviation. Then I put the data into graphs so that I could analyze it better.
Once I looked at all the graphs, I noticed that the feelings of the children about adoption were better after they had been in America for amount of time. The average feeling about adoption for kids before coming to America was 1.7. The average feeling about adoption for kids after coming to America was 1.2. I wanted to see if those were actually different so I calculated the difference of means and used the t-test to see if they were statistically significantly different.
Results
I started out the project with the hypothesis that everyone will say that they wanted to be adopted because they wanted a family. I feel about 80% will have said yes because they want to, 5% because someone told them to say yes, and another 15% said yes because they felt they didn’t have a choice on adoption. After looking at the questionnaires, I found that none said yes to adoption because they were told to say yes. I was also surprised to see how many children felt they had no choice in the adoption process.
The first question I looked at was the age of the respondents to the survey. I had a range of ages from 11 years old to 20 years old with an average age of 15 years old and a standard deviation of 2.1 years. This resulted in a nice bell-shaped curve so that I can be assured my survey was a representative sample of a normally distributed population. Next I looked at age at adoption which resulted in a range of 2 to15 years of age with a average age of 9.5 years old and a standard deviation of 4.4 years. This gives a more flat shaped curve so that the results can be applicable to all ages at adoption.
When I broke the ages down into categories, I found that for respondents that were adopted under the age of 6, their age range was 14-17 with an average of 15, for respondents adopted between the ages of 7-11, their age range was 11-16 with an average of 13.5, and for respondents adopted over the age of 12, their age range was 14-20 with an average age of 16.5 years.
The next part of my project was to look at the results for having choice in making the decision to be adopted. Overall, for all respondents, 28% of the children said they didn’t have a choice in the decision to be adopted and 72% felt they did have a choice. Breaking this down into age categories, 25% of ages 6 and under had a choice and 75% felt they had no choice in adoption. Of the 7-11 age category, 75% said they did have a choice and only 25% felt they didn’t have a choice, and in the 12 and over category, 100% felt they had a choice in the adoption decision.
The next part of my project was to look at how long it took children to make the decision to be adopted. The children who didn’t have a choice were removed from this calculation. For all ages, 62% said yes immediately, 23% took between 1 day to 1 month, and 15% took over 1 month. The data was converted into quantitative (assigned values of 1,2, or 3). The average was 1.5 with a standard deviation of .62. Looking at how long to make the adoption decision by age category showed, 100% immediate in the under 6 category, 83% immediate, and 17% over 1 month, for the ages of 7-11, and for the over 12 age category, 50% immediately, 33% 1 day to 1 month, and 17% took over 1 month.
The last part of my project was looking at children’s feelings about adoption before and after coming to the United States. Looking at all respondents, before coming the United States 56% felt good, 22% felt neutral, and 22% felt bad. After coming to the United States, 83% felt good, 11% felt neutral, and 6% felt bad. After converting these statistics to quantitative numbers, before the was average 1.7 and after the average was 1.2. 1.7 before was very close to neutral and 1.2 after was very close to good. Even though these numbers are close, I wanted to show they were in fact very different and represented two different groups of feelings before and after coming to America. I calculated the difference of averages and used to t-test to show that these were not the same and represented two different populations with a 95% confidence.
Breaking down feelings about adoption before and after coming to the United States by age category showed that for the under age 6 category, before only 25% were good, 50% neutral, and 25% were bad and after 100% were good. For the 7-11 age group, before 63% were good, 13% were neutral, and 25% were bad, and after 88% were good, and 13% bad. For the over 12 age group before 67% were good, 17% neutral, and 17% bad, and after 83% were good, and17% neutral.
Every study has some bias, and there were several areas in this study where there could have been sampling errors. One of the difficulties on this project was the countries the respondents were from. All of the respondents to my questionnaire were from Eastern Europe. There were none from other common countries children are adopted from, including China which is the most common country adopted from by Americans. Next time, this could be fixed by getting a better sample of children from other countries.
Another bias was the people responding to the survey. It could be skewed against people that didn’t want to know their children were unhappy about adoption and maybe wouldn't let them fill out the questionnaire. I can’t change the parents of the younger kids not letting them fill out the questionnaire, but I could ask children who are now older, over 18, to fill it out. This could have problems, as sometimes, they might not remember, since they are older, but it would take care of the parents problem.
Another kind of error is investigator error. When I was reading the answers to the questionnaire from my respondents, I realized that I could have misunderstood some of their responses and maybe used wrong numbers when converting their answers into numbers. This could be fixed by doing the questionnaire better, making it easier with simpler questions so that younger children will understand them better, and actually asking people to rate their feelings by number themselves instead of me converting their answers.
Conclusion
My hypothesis of 80% of adopted children will have said yes because they wanted to be adopted, 5% because someone told them to say yes, and another 15% said yes because they felt they didn’t have a choice on adoption 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. A lot are excited, but there will be some that aren’t. 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. Nobody specifically stated that someone told them to say yes. 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.
There 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.
References
1. Fowler, Jim. Practical Statistics for Field Biology, 2nd edition. Manchester, Wiley and Sons, 1998.
2. Bureau of Consular Affairs, US Department of State, http://adoption.state.gov.
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_adoption.
4. Adoption.com. http://international.adoption.com.
5. Families for Russian and Ukrainian Adoption, http://www.frua.org.
6. Advocate for Orphans, http://advocatefororphans.wordpress.com.
7. http://www.adoption101.com/international_adoption.html.
