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Presentation
Positive Attributes of Adopted Adolescents Based on Parent and Self Reports
Rudd Adoption Research Program Annual Conferences
  • Christina Roth, Ms., UMass Amherst
  • Holly Grant, Ms., UMass Amherst
  • Harold D Grotevant, Dr., UMass Amherst
Location
UMass Amherst
Start Date
7-4-2010 4:00 PM
End Date
7-4-2010 5:30 PM
Disciplines
Description
Research in the field of adoption has been primarily problem based with little or no focus on positive attributes of the adopted child. The purpose of this poster is to examine positive attributes and strengths of adopted adolescents from their own perspectives as well as those of their parents. For this study we conducted a descriptive analysis of comments from Achenbach’s (1991) Youth Self Report (YSR) and Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). We examined whether parents’ and adolescents’ open-ended comments about strengths differed as a function of adolescent gender and age; we also examined the degree of correspondence between comments from adolescents, mothers, and fathers. This study uses data from the Minnesota- Texas Adoption Research Project (MTARP), a longitudinal study following 190 adoption kinship networks in which the children were adopted as infants who were voluntarily placed by their birthparents for adoption. We examined data from Wave 2, when the adopted children were adolescents. We transcribed and coded open responses taken from the adolescent YSR in response to the question “Please describe the best things about yourself” and from the CBCL reports from the mother and father regarding “Please describe the best things about your child”. We developed a coding system based on literature from the Positive Youth Development Project (Catalano, Berglund, Ryan, Lonczak, and Hawkins, 1998) and the Search Institute’s literature on developmental assets (Search Institute, 2008). Each person’s responses were coded independently by two of the co-authors; disagreements were reconciled by discussion. The original 26 codes were subsequently grouped into five categories: relational competence, specific skills, positive disposition, moral behavior, and motivation. Total strengths were also computed. Data were analyzed from 161 families, with specific data from 135 adopted adolescents (45.1% male, mean age = 15.5 years), 144 adoptive fathers, and 158 adoptive mothers. T-tests revealed no differences in frequencies of comments in each category as a function of whether parents were reporting on male or female adolescents. However, for the adolescents themselves, females reported a higher average number of overall reported strengths as well as a higher overall mean in relational competence. ANOVAs revealed no age differences between early, middle, and late adolescents on the five categories. Analyses in progress are focusing on correspondence between the open ended responses about strengths and the social competence scales of the YSR and CBCL, and are also examining the positive attributes in the context of adolescents’ self- and parent-reported problem behavior scores. This is an important new direction, since problem behaviors have typically been analyzed without consideration of adoptees’ positive attributes, which may mitigate or contextualize parents’ interpretation of the problem behaviors. One goal of this presentation is to encourage researchers’ attention to the significant strengths that adopted adolescents display, and not to focus solely on problematic behaviors.
Comments

References

Catalano, Richard., Berglund, Lisa., Ryan, Jeanne., Lonczak, Heather., Hawkins, J. (1998) Positive Youth Development in the United States: Research Findings on Evaluations of Positive Youth Development Programs. Retrieved September 2009, from http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/PositiveYouthDev99/

Search Institute (2008) Retrieved September 2009, from http://www.search-institute.org/developmental-assets/lists

Citation Information
Christina Roth, Holly Grant and Harold D Grotevant. "Positive Attributes of Adopted Adolescents Based on Parent and Self Reports" (2010)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/harold_grotevant/1/