Adoption Breakdown Research Comes of Age: Introduction to the Special Section

For some 20 years now, the Donaldson Adoption Institute and its cooperating partners have been conducting surveys on the perception and attitudes that U.S. citizens hold about adoption. Findings in these surveys reflect how the way adoption is viewed changes over time. While one of the key findings in the 2002 survey was that adoption had a better reputation than ever (Harris Interactive, 2002), the 2016 survey highlighted the need to strike a balance between leveraging the positive views about adoption while simultaneously calling attention to the reality of the problems the adoption community faces (Donaldson Adoption Institute, 2016). For this community, one of the most distressing events occurs when the adoptee leaves the adoptive family due to serious difficulties in the family’s life together, often with no prospect for reunification. Papers in this special section are devoted to the study of this phenomenon.

Using different terms and methods, research into adoption breakdown is by no means new, as illustrated in the review article included in this special section. But the recent proliferation of synthesis of findings and research reviews (Faulkner, Adkins, Fong, & Rolock, 2017; Festinger, 2014; Palacios, Rolock, Selwyn, & Barbosa-Ducharne, this issue; Rosnati, Ranieri, & Ferrari, 2017; Smith, 2014; White, 2016) attests to the increase in studies aimed at unveiling the extent, nature, and implications of this issue. The publication in a research journal of a collection of papers devoted to adoption breakdown marks the field of study coming of age.

There are multiple reasons for this recent increased interest in the topic. The changing demography of adoption is likely involved. In many Western countries, there has been an increasing trend in the number of adoptions from foster care for children who were in state custody for whom reunification with their birth families was not possible. In the United States, for instance, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of children adopted through the foster care system. In 1995, there were approximately 106,000 children receiving federally supported adoption assistance. Ten years later, in 2005, this had increased to 362,000 and in 2015 to 441,000 (Committee on Ways and Means of the U.S. House of Representatives, 2014; Rolock, Pérez, White, & Fong, 2018). Furthermore, according to the U.S. Children’s Bureau (2015), for adoptions between October 2013 and September 2014, 81% of the adoptions nationwide involved special needs children (with disabilities, sibling groups, and older age at placement).

A similar trend was observed with intercountry adoptions, where there was a sharp increase prior to a more recent steady decline beginning in 2005. According to Selman (2009), in the Western receiving countries, the number of international adoptions more than doubled between 1995 and 2004. The “baby boomers” of those years started to reach adolescence sometime in the decade starting in 2010. As in the case of domestic adoptions discussed before, the adoptees involved included an increased proportion of special needs children.

Since, as described in the review paper in this special section, most adoption breakdown cases tend to happen in the early adolescent years, it could be that with increasing adoption numbers, the breakdown cases are on the rise, attracting increased attention. The available information discussed in Palacios et al. (this issue) did not find that the increase in the number of adoptions is necessarily linked to an increase in the breakdown incidence, although perhaps the increased complexity of the children’s profiles could be linked. In any case, the lack of reliable comparative studies prevent from comparing figures from past and present years, and it could also simply be that, as Delepière (2017) suggests, a hidden phenomenon has come to light.

At the same time, there has been a notable upsurge in the number of researchers, practitioners, and policy makers with an interest in “failing adoptions.” As an example, the book on international adoptions breakdown compiled by the International Social Service (Jeannin, 2017) contains more than 50 short chapters written by authors from around the world and from disciplines as varied as social work, psychology, sociology, anthropology, law, pediatrics, and education. The unprecedented existence of stakeholders spread around the globe is a clear indication of the visibility and the importance of understanding adoption breakdown.

From the perspective of adoption research, in their analysis of historical trends, Palacios and Brodzinsky (2010) pointed out the fact that, almost since its inception, adoption research took two parallel tracks governed by different interests and inspired by different disciplines. From the perspective of social work and child welfare, researchers sought to understand the best policies and practices related to the placing of children and the type of support needed to ensure adoption stability and the well-being of all family members. From the perspective of developmental psychology and psychopathology, researchers were concerned primarily with mental health issues, the impact of preadoption experiences on later adjustment, and the dynamics of adoptive family life. In this historical perspective, one of the suggestions for future research was the need to bridge the gap between these two traditions for their mutual enrichment and for the benefit of the adoption-related community of children, families, and adoption practitioners and researchers. Adoption disruption was then mentioned as one of the topics where the interests of these two approaches could converge. It is not by chance that the authors of the articles in this special section represent the two disciplines of social work and developmental/clinical psychology. The implication is not only that more researchers are devoted to investigating adoption breakdown, but also that there is an increased convergence of disciplines producing a richer approach to the complexity of the problem under study.

All this considered, there seems to be a critical mass of circumstances, researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to explain the fact that adoption breakdown research has come to the stage of a special section in a social work research journal. As a disciplinary journal devoted to the publication of empirical research concerning the outcomes of social work practice, Research on Social Work Practice is ideally placed to present this collection of articles.

The authors of the articles in this special section come not only from different disciplines, but also work in different geographical areas, with authors from the United States, from England and Wales, and from continental Europe (Portugal and Spain). These countries represent different adoption realities: in both the United States and England and Wales, there is a prevalence of adoptions from the national foster care system, with a low percentage of intercountry adoptions in the two latter countries and more presence in the former. Almost all the adoptions in Portugal are domestic and involve children who are adopted after being in residential care, with foster care almost nonexistent during the years reported in the article published here (and, regrettably, also at the present time). For Spain, in the years reported in the study in this special section, intercountry adoption (with China and the Russian Federation as the main sending countries) clearly outnumbered domestic adoptions.

The articles in this special section include different methods, from a matched design of intact-disrupted groups in Barbosa-Ducharne and Marinho’s article to the use of standardized instruments, plus interviews and qualitative data in Selwyn; from the use of administrative data in Rolock, White, Ocasio, Zhang, MacKenzie, and Fong to the analysis of case files in Paniagua, Palacios, Jiménez-Morago, and Rivera, as well as in Barbosa-Ducharne and Marinho. In their article, these last authors studied breakdown cases occurring after the placement for adoption but before court finalization, while Selwyn and the Rolock et al. studies examine adoptions already legalized (finalized, in the United States terminology) postorder adoptions. Also, while the adoptees in the preceding articles come from domestic adoptions, the case files analyzed by Paniagua and colleagues involved both domestic and intercountry adoptions.

The special section opens with a research review authored by Palacios, Rolock, Selwyn, and Barbosa-Ducharne, analyzing the diversity of terms and methods, the incidence of adoption breakdown and its associated factors, and concluding with practice and policy implications. The first empirical article, by Barbosa-Ducharne and Marinho, studies a sample of Portuguese late adoptees and explores factors that, aside from age at placement, are associated with the breakdown experience. In the second empirical article, Rolock et al. use U.S. longitudinal administrative data to examine the preadoption characteristics associated with postadoption foster care reentry. In the third article, Selwyn, working with subjects in England and Wales, drawing on interviews with families who had experienced an adoption disruption or who were troubled and in crisis, investigates whether sibling relationships had influenced the studied outcomes. The fourth empirical article, by Paniagua et al., looks into the duration of the placements ending in breakdown and into the role of age at placement in their study in Spain. Although all these articles include a section on implications for policy and practice, it is in the final article of this special section that Brodzinsky and Smith, together with a commentary of the preceding articles, consider in more detail, and from a perspective broader than the one afforded by the individual articles, the practice and policy implications.

The reviewers of the articles in this special section were asked to complete an unusual task of reviewing not just one article but the full collection of manuscripts. In addition to internal review among the authors of the papers included in this special section, the manuscripts were read by a total of seven reviewers. We are very grateful for their helpful comments and suggestions.