Romanian Orphan Studies - Effects Of Institutionalisation Flashcards
What is institutionalisation?
The effect of institutional care
Possible effects include social, mental and physical underdevelopment.
Who conducted a study about Romanian orphans and when?
Rutter and Sonuga-Barke
2010
What was the procedure for the Romanian orphans study?
They investigated 165 Romanian orphans who were institutionalised, and of this group 111 were adopted before the age of 2 and the further 54 by 4.
The adoptees have been tested at regular intervals (ages 4, 6, 11, and 15) to assess their physical, cognitive and social development.
Information has also been gathered in interviews with parents and teachers.
Their progress has been compared to a control group of 52 British children adopted in the UK before the age of 6 months.
What were the findings of the Romanian orphans study?
At the time of adoption Romanian orphans lagged behind their British counterparts on all measures of physical, cognitive and social development.
They were smaller, weighed less and were classified as mentally retarded.
By the age of 4, some of the children had caught up with their British counterparts. This was true for almost all of the Romanians adopted before the age of 6 months.
Many of the children adopted after 6 months showed disinhibited attachments and had issues with peer relationships.
This suggests that long-term consequences may be less severe than previously thought if children have the opportunity to form attachments.
However, when children do not form attachments then the consequences are likely to be severe.
What are the effects of institutionalisation?
Physical underdevelopment
Intellectual underfunctioning
Disinhibited attachment
Poor parenting
What is meant by physical underdevelopment?
Children in institutional care were physically smaller, Gardner (1972), showed this was due to lack of emotional care that caused deprivation dwarfism, not poor nourishment.
What is meant by intellectual underfunctioning?
Cognitive development is also affected by emotional deprivation
What is meant by disinhibited attachment?
A form of insecure attachment where children do not discriminate between people they choose as attachment figures. Such children will treat near-strangers with inappropriate familiarity and may be attention seeking.
What is meant by poor parenting?
Harlow showed that monkeys raised with a surrogate mother went on to become poor parents. This is supported in a study by Quinton (1984)
What happened in a study by Quinton?
He compared a group of 50 women who had been reared in institutions with a control group of 50 women reared at home.
When the women were in their 20s it was found that the ex-institutional women were experiencing extreme difficulties in acting as parents.
For example, more of the ex-institutional women had children who spent time in care.
What are the evaluative points for the Romanian orphans study?
Individual differences Real-life application Value of longitudinal studies Deprivation is only one factor Institutionalisation may just be slow development
What is meant by individual differences?
Some research suggests that individuals who do not form a primary attachment within the early sensitive period are unable to recover.
However, this is not true of all children who experience institutionalisation.
In all the studies, some children are not as strongly affected as others (i.e there are individual differences).
Rutter has suggested that it might be that some of the children did receive special attention in the institution, perhaps becuase they smiled more, and this would mean they did have some early attachment experiences.
Bowlby’s study of children hospitalised with TB showed that there were individual differences in the way children cope.
What is meant by real-life application?
This research points specially to the importance of early adoption.
In the past, mothers who were going to give a baby up for adoption were encouraged to nurse the baby for a significant period of time.
By the time the baby was adopted the sensitive period for attachment formation may have passed, making it difficult to form secure attachments.
Today’s babies are adopted within the first week of birth and research shows that adoptive mothers and children are just as securely attached as non-adoptive families
What is meant by value of longitudinal studies?
The importance of these studies is that they followed the lives of children over many years - longitudinal studies.
Such studies take a lot of time which means a lot of planning and waiting for results, but the benefits are large.
Without such studies we may mistakenly conclude that there are major effects due to early institutional care, whereas some of these studies show that the effects may disappear after sufficient time and with suitable high-quality care.
What is meant by deprivation is only one factor?
The orphans were faced with much more than emotional deprivation.
Their physical conditions were appalling, which impacted their health.
The lack of cognitive stimulation would also affect their development.
It is more likely that damage only occurs when there are multiple risk factor.
It is also the case that, for many institutionalised children, poor care in infancy is followed by poor subsequent care, such as difficulty living in poverty, experiencing parental disharmony and so on (Turner and Lloyd, 1995).
