Research results...

Recently, I conducted a research study along with a fellow student at Fordham University. Our study was conducted in hopes of exploring the issues of family connectedness among adult adoptees. Most of the literature that we reviewed was contradictory in their findings of how adult adoptees adjusted. Personally, I had always felt very disconnected from my adoptive family and wondered if that was a result of being adopted or of the family I grew up in. I wanted to know if other adoptees felt the same way that I felt.

There were many limitations to our study, the main limitation being the survey instrument that we used. There were no scales available to test the connectedness of adoptees to their adoptive family so we had to create our own scale. The survey was a 55 question survey, with 24 statements that the respondents were asked to pick either "strongly agree", "agree", "disagree", "strongly disagree", or "don't know." Examples of these statements are "I feel valued as an individual in my family," "I feel connected to my family,"" I could stop talking to my friends today and it would not really bother me," etc.

Because of time constraints, we had to set a cut-off date for the returned surveys. By that date we had received responses from 28 adoptees and 19 non-adoptees. This small sampling size was another limitation to our study, and as a result, any generalizations can only be made to the specific respondent group and not to the overall adoptee population.

The major finding in the study showed that there was a significant difference between the adoptees and non-adoptees that participated in the study. Of the 28 adoptee respondents, 64.3% reported that they felt disconnected and 31.6% of the non-adoptees stated that they felt disconnected. The reverse was true for having feelings of connectedness toward one's family. Of the 19 non-adoptees, 68.4% were rated as feeling connected to their families and 35.7% of the adoptee respondents were rated as connected.

An extraneous factor that was thought to have an effect on the adoptee's feelings of connectedness was if s/he was involved in an adoptee search and support group. The hypothesis was: individuals involved in a search and support group joined because they did not feel connected to their adopted family. Yet, the results indicated that there was not a statistically significant relationship between feelings of connectedness and participation in a search and support group.

In conclusion, although surveying 28 adoptees and 19 non-adoptees is by no means a large study, the study did show that adopted individuals had a lower sense of family connectedness than non-adopted individuals. It also indicated that there is a strong need for additional research. The adoption status follows an individual throughout his/her life, and the need for greater understanding is essential. The adoption system as it is now must have many problems for a majority of adoptees to feel disconnected to their families and others around them. The system needs to be changed so that it provides assistance for future adoptees.

Thank you to all of those who took the time out to complete our survey. We greatly appreciated the assistance

Loraine Hwang
Student, Fordham University

Credits: Loraine Hwang