The Effects of Institutionalisation Flashcards
What does institutional care often involve?
- Privation and deprivation effects.
- Displays of disinhibited attachment.
What is a disinhibited attachment?
When a child is clingly, displays attention seeking behaviour and displays indiscriminate sociability to adults.
What happened in Goldfarb (1943)?
- Compared 15 children raised in institutions from 6 months to 3.5 years old, with 15 children who went straight from their biological mother into foster care.
- By age three, the socially isolated children scored worse on measures of abstract thinking, social maturity, rule following and sociability.
- Socially isolated children had an average IQ of 72 compared to the other group who had an average IQ of 95.
What is a weakness of Goldfarb (1943)?
Did not use random samples, so it’s possible that the foster children were naturally more intelligent, sociable and healthier than the isolated children.
What happened in Bowlby (1944)?
- Compared 44 juvenile thieves with non-thieves who had experienced emotional problems.
- Found that 32% of the thieves exhibited affectionless psychopathy.
Found that 86% of the affectionless psychopatjs had experienced a maternal seperation compared to 17% who were not catagorised as affectionless psychopaths.
What was the method in Tizard and Hodges (1978)?
- Studied privated children in institutional care in their first four months of life.
- Children couldn’t form attachments because of high staff turnover and a no staff-children relationship policy.
- Children either remained in the instituion, were adopted or returned home.
- All were assessed at age 8 and 16.
- Compared with a control group of non-institutionalised children.
What was found in Tizard and Hodges (1978)?
- Children who remained in the institution had no strong attachments and had problems relating to peers.
- Adopted children formed strong attachments with their adoptive families, but did hve problems with relationships outside their families.
- Children restored to their homes tended to have poor family and peer relationships and behavioural problems.
What is a weakness of Tizard and Hodges (1978)?
They suffered from a high participant drop out rate.
What was the aim of Rutter (1998)?
To assess whether loving and nurturing care could overturn the effects of privation that the children had suffered in Romanian orphanages.
What was the IV in Rutter (1998)?
The age of adoption.
What were the three age conditions studied in Rutter (1998)?
- Condition one: children adopted before six months.
- Condition two: children adopted between six months and two years.
- Condition three: children adopted after two years.
What was the DV in Rutter (1998)?
The children’s level of cognitive functioning
What was the procedure in Rutter (1998)?
- 111 Romanian orphans were assessed for cognitive functioning on arrival in Britain, and when they were aged four.
- A control of 52 British adopted children were also assessed.
What were the findings of Rutter (1998)?
- Around 50% of the Romanian orphans were poor in cognitive functioning at initial assessment.
- Most were underweight.
- The control group did not show these deficits.
- At age four the Romanian orphans showed great improvement in physical and cognitive development.
- The orphans adopted before six months of age did as well as the control group.
What was concluded in Rutter (1998)?
- The negative effects of institutionalisation can be overcome by sensitive nurturing.
- As the British adopted children did not suffer negative developmental outcomes, it can be inferred that seperation from carers will not, on its own, accord negative developmental effects.
