Romanian Orphans

Romanian Orphans

• Procedure: Rutter has followed a group of 165 Romanian orphans adopted in Britain to test what extent good care could make up for poor early experiences in institutions.
• Physical, cognitive and emotional development has been assessed at ages 4, 6, 11 and 15. A group of 52 British children adopted around the same time has served as a control group.
• Findings: When they first arrived in the UK half of the adoptees showed signs of delayed intellectual development and the majority were severely undernourished. Age 11 adopted children showed differential rates of recovery that were related to the age of adoption
• The mean IQ of those children adopted before the age of 6 months was 102, and with 86 for those adopted months and 2 years and 77 for those adopted after 2 years.
• A group of 52 children adopted around the same time have served as a control group.
• In terms of attachment, they're the difference in outcome related to whether adoption took place before or after six months. If they were adopted after they were six months they showed signs of a particular attachment style called disinhibited attachment.
• Symptoms include attention seeking, clinginess and social behaviour directed indiscriminately towards all adults, familiar and unfamiliar.
• In contrast those children adopted before the age of 6 months rarely displayed disinhibited attachment.

Bucharest Early Intervention Project

• Procedure: Zeanah assess attachment in 95 children age 12 - 31 months who had spent most of their lives in institutional care. They were compared to a control group of 50 children who never lived in a institution their attachment type was measured using the strange situation. In addition, carers were asked about unusual social behaviour including clingy, attention-seeking behaviour.
• Findings: They found that 74% of the control group came out as securely attached where as, only 19% of the institutionalized group were securely attached with 65% being classified with disorganised attachment. The description of disinhibited attachment applied to 44% of institutionalized children as opposed to less than 20% of the controls.

Slide 3

• Disinhibited attachment is a typical effect of spending time in an institution they are equally friendly and affectionate towards people they know well or who are strangers that they have just met. This is highly unusual behaviour; most children in their second year show stranger anxiety.
• Rutter has explained disinhibited attachment as an adaptation to living with multiple caregivers during the sensitive period for attachment formation.
• In poor quality institutions like those in Romania a child might have 50 carers, none of whom they see enough to form secure attachments.
• Mental disability: In Rutter's study most children show signs of mental disability when they arrived in Britain. However, most of these adopted before they were 6 months old caught up with the control group by Age 4.
• It appears that, emotional development, damage to intellectual development as a result of institutionalisation can be recovered provided adoption takes place before the age of 6 months - the age at which attachments form.

Evaluation

• Real life application
• Studying the Romanian orphans has enhanced our understanding of the effects of institutionalisation. Search results have led to improvements in the way children are cared for in institutions. For example, orphanages and children's homes now avoid having large numbers of caregivers for each child and instead ensure that a much smaller number of people, only one or two people, play a central role for the child. This person is called a key worker. Having a key worker means that children have the chance to develop normal attachments and helps avoid disinhibited attachment.
• This shows that such research has been immensely valuable in practical terms.
• Fewer extraneous variables than other orphan studies
• There were many orphan studies before the Romanian orphans became available to study but often these studies involved children who had experienced loss or trauma before they were institutionalised. For example they may have experienced neglect, abuse bereavement. These children were often traumatized by their experiences and suffered bereavement. It was very hard to observe the effects of institutionalisation in isolation because the children were dealing with multiple factors which functioned as confounding participant variables.
• In the case of Romanian orphans it has been possible to study institutionalisation without these confounding variables, means the findings have increased internal validity.

Evaluation cont.

• The Romanian orphanages were not typical
• Although much useful data about institutionalization has come out of Romanian orphan studies, it is possible that conditions were so bad that the results cannot be applied to understanding the impact of better quality institutional care or indeed any situation where children experience deprivation. For example, Romanian orphanages had particularly poor standards of care, especially when it came to forming any relationship with the children, extremely low levels of intellectual stimulation.
• This is a limitation of the Romanian orphan studies because the unusual situational variables mean the studies may after all lack generalisability.
• Ethical issues
• One of the methodological issues of Rutter's ERA is that children were not randomly assigned to conditions. Researchers did not interfere with the adoption process, means that those children adopted early may have been the most sociable ones, a confounding variable.
• To control for such variables, another major investigation of fostering versus institutional care did use random allocation. In Bucharest early intervention project Romanian orphans were randomly allocated to institutional care or fostering. This is methodologically better because it removes the confounding variable of which children are chosen by parents but it raises ethical issues.

The long term effects are not clear

• The studies described on the previous slides have now followed up on fostered and adopted orphans into the mid teens and found some lasting effects of early experience, in particular for those adopted late. However, it is too soon to say with certainty whether children suffered long or short term effects. It may be that the children who spent more time in institutions and currently lag behind in intellectual development or display attachment difficulties may still catch up adults. Equally, early adopted/foster children who appear to have no issues now may experience emotional problems as adults.