Romanian orphan studies Flashcards
Who conducted the English and Romanian adoptee study?
Rutter et al.
What happened in the English and Romanian adoptee study?
Rutter et al followed 165 Romanian orphans to look at the effect of good care and whether it could make up for poor early experiences. They measured physical, cognitive and emotional development at 4, 6, 11 and 15 years. A group of 52 British adopted children were also used as a control.
What did Rutter’s Romanian orphan study find?
When they arrived in the UK, half of the adoptees showed signs of delayed intellectual development and the majority were malnourished. By 11, adopted children showed different rates of recovery related to their age. The mean IQ of those adopted before 6 months was 102 compared to 86 whe adopted between 6 months and 2 years and 77 for those adopted after 2 years. They also found that children adopted after 6 months were more likely to have disinhibited attachment types.
What happened in the Bucharest Intervention project?
95 children aged 12-31 months who spent their lives in institutional care were assessed for their attachment types and compared to 50 children who had never lived in an institution. They found that 74% of the control group were securely attached but only 19% of the institutional were securely attached and 65% were classed as having a disorganised attachment type.
What are the two effects of insitiutionalisation which were explored?
Disinhibited attachment and mental retardation
What was found about disinhibited attachment?
People with this attachment type are friendly towards people they know well and strangers. This can be explained by the fact that children in Romania are looked after by multiple carers and so don’t form a main attachment.
What was found about mental retardation?
Damage to intellectual development as a results of institutionalisation can be recovered if adoption takes place before six months, the age at which attachments form.
What are the strengths of the romanian orphan study?
There is real life application to orpanages in order to improve the treatment of children and to allow them to develop normally.
There are fewer extraneous variables than in other studies as the children hadn’t experienced trauma or loss, meaning there are less confounding variables.
What are the strengths of the romanian orphan study?
The Romanian orphanages are not typical of orphanages as they had very low standards of of care, meaning it is hard to generalise to the popuation.
There are ethical issues with the Bucharest Early Intervention project as they were randomly allocated to institutional care or fostering.
The long term effects of the orphanages are not yet clear and so we don’t know of any later impact of poor early experiences.
