Romanian Orphan Studies: Institutionalisation Flashcards
What is orphan studies?
Children placed in care because parents cannot look after them. An orphan is a child whose parents have either died or have abandoned them permanently.
What is institutionalisation?
- The effects of living in institutional care for example of hospital or orphanage where people live for a long time
- we are interested in the effects of institutional care on children’s attachment development.
Explain Romanian orphan studies background?
- the Romanian president in the 1990s ordered women to have five children.
- Many Romanian parents could not afford to keep their children and the children ended up being in huge orphanages.
- after the 1989 Roman revolution, Many of the children were adopted some by British parents.
what is the procedure of Rutter research Romania?
Rutter and colleagues followed a group of 165 Romanian orphans for many years. The aim of the ERA was to investigate the extent to which good care could make up for poor early experiences and institutions. It had been assessed at age of 4,611,15 and 22.A group of 52 children from the UK adopted was the control group.
What were the findings of Rutters research Romania?
When children first arrived in UK they showed signs of delayed intellectual development and majority were nourished at age 11.
- The mean IQ of children adoption adopted before age of six months was 102 to compare to 86 for those adopted between six months and two years and 77 for those adopted after two years.
- There was a different outcomes of attachment, after six months showed signs of a particular attachment style called disinhibited attachment style. They were attention seeking and clingy. those adopted after six months rarely displayed disinhibited attachment.
What was Zeanah experiment procedure?
Zeanah conducted the Bucharest early intervention project assessing attachment in 95 Romanian child children between 12 and 31 months who would spend their lives in institutional care they were compared to group of 50 children who didn’t live in institutional care.
- they were measured using a strange situation and asked for unusual behaviour including clingy and attention seeking behaviour towards adults.
what were the findings in Zeanah’s experiment?
74% of the control group were classed as securely attached compared to 19% of the institutional group were securely attached.
- in contrast disinhibited attachment applied to 44% of institutionalised children compared to 20% of the control.
What are the effects of institutionalisation?
Disinhibited attachment – children spent their early years in institution showed signs of disinhibited attachment being equally friendly and affectionate to people and strangers. This is because institutions in Romania a child might have 50 carers and doesn’t spend enough time to form a secure attachment.
Intellectual disability – most children should sign of intellectual disability, but if they were adopted before six months, it can be recovered as this is when attachment forms.
What is one strength of the Romanian orphanage studies?
It’s improved conditions for children grow up outside their family home.
- It made psychologists understand the effects of early institutional care and how to prevent the worst effects. They made improvements in conditions and they now avoid having a large number of caregivers , they now instead of one or two key workers and there’s now more effort for kids to get forced to care or to have them adopted
evaluate one of a strength of Roman orphanage studies?
Another one was the lack of confounding variables for example there are many orphan studies before the Romanian one like second world war but they had a lot of traumas and it was difficult to detangler the effects of neglect. However the Romanian orphanages had been handed over by loving parents who could not afford to keep them this means the results were much less likely to be confounded by other negative experiences.
What is one limitation of the Romanian orphanage studies?
The current lack of data on development ERA study looked at children in the early to mid 20s. We do not have data to answer interesting questions such as the long-term effects of institutional care this means we have to track them for a long time.
- because of the longitudinal parts of the study, participants have to be followed over a long time. This means you don’t know the long term effects so they could catch up.
