Romanian Orphans Flashcards
(22 cards)
What are Romanian orphan studies and what are they studying?
- they are studies concerned with children placed in care because their parents cannot look after them
- institutionalisation > the effects of institutional care on a child’s attachment & development
What did Rutter conduct?
English Romanian Adoptee study (ERA)
What was the aim of Rutters research?
To investigate the extent to which good care could make up for poor early experiences in institutions
How many Romanian orphans did Rutter follow and at what ages was physical, cognitive and emotional development assessed in Rutters research?
- 165 Romanian orphans adopted by british families
- 4,6,11, 15 & 22-25
Who were the Romanian adoptees compared to? ERA
a control group of 52 British adoptees
What were Rutters findings when Romanian adoptees first arrived in the UK?
They were malnourished and showed signs of delayed intellectual development
What did recovery rates in Rutters study relate to at the age of 11?
age of adoption
What was the mean IQ for Romanians adopted in the first 6 months, 6 months-2years & after two years?
- 6 months=102
- 6months-2years = 86
- after 2 years=77
In Rutters study what was the difference in attachment outcome between those adopted before or after 6 months?
- those orphans adopted after 6 months showed signs of disinhibited attachment
- symptoms included: attention seeking, clinginess, indiscriminate affection
What did Rutter conclude from his study?
Supports there is a sensitive period in development of attachments and without this attachment they can have long lasting effects
What project did Zeanah et al conduct?
Bucharest Early Intervention project (BEI)
What did Zeanah et al assess and what was her sample?
assessing attachment in 95 children aged 12-31 months, who spent most of their lives in institutions> using the strange situation to measure attachment type
Who was Zeanah et al’s sample compared to?
control group of 50 children who never lived in an institution
What did Zeanah et al find in relation to secure attachments?
only 19% of institutionalised group were classes as securely attached compared to 74%of control group
What percentage of children in Zeanah et al’s study were classified with a disorganised attachment & disinhibited?
- 65% disorganised
- 44% disinhibited
What are the two effects of institutionalisation?
- Disinhibited attachment
- Intellectual disability
What is disinhibited attachment?
a form of insecure attachment where children are equally friendly and affectionate towards people they know well and strangers (no stranger anxiety)
What does Rutter say disinhibited attachment is an adaption of?
- an adaptation to living with multiple caregivers during the sensitive period for attachment formation
- In poor quality institutions, a child might have 50 carers but doesn’t spend enough time with any one of them to be able to form a secure attachment.
What is a strength of Romanian orphan studies?
- real world application
- helps to improve conditions for children growing up outside their family home.
- Studying the Romanian orphans has improved psychologists’ understanding of the effects of early institutional care and how to prevent the worst of these effects (Langton 2006).
- This has led to improvements in the conditions experienced by looked-after children, i.e. children growing up in the care system.
- eg children’s homes now avoid having large numbers of caregivers for each child.
Instead the children tend to have one or two ‘key workers’ who play a central role in their emotional care. - institutional care is now seen as an undesirable option for looked-after children. Considerable effort is made to accommodate such children in foster care or to have them adopted instead.
- This means that children in institutional care have a chance to develop normal attachments and disinhibited attachment is avoided.
What is another strength of Romanian orphan studies?
- lack of confounding variables
- There were many orphan studies before the Romanian orphans became available to study (e.g. orphans studied during the Second World War). Many of the children studied in orphanages had experienced varying degrees of trauma, and it is difficult to disentangle the effects of neglect, physical abuse and bereavement from those of institutional care.
- However the children from Romanian orphanages had, in the main, been handed over by loving parents who could not afford to keep them.
- This means that results were much less likely to be confounded by other negative early experiences
- higher internal validity
What is a limitation of Romanian orphan studies?
- studying children from Romanian orphanages might have introduced different confounding variables.
- The quality of care in these institutions was remarkably poor, with children receiving very little intellectual stimulation or comfort.
- This means that the harmful effects seen in studies of Romanian orphans may represent the effects of poor institutional care rather than institutional care per se.
What is another limitation of Romanian orphan studies?
- lack of adult data on adult development
- The latest data from the ERA Study looked at the children in their early- to mid-20s. This means that we do not currently have data to answer some of the most interesting research questions about the long-term effects of early institutional care.
- These research questions include the lifetime prevalence of mental health problems and participants’ success in forming and maintaining adult romantic and parental relationships.
- It will take a long time to gather this data because of the longitudinal design of the study,
- This means it will be some time before we know more completely what the long-term effects are for the Romanian orphans.
