Abstract
This tribute is confined to the time when I worked with David at the Institute of Psychiatry. When I was appointed to run the newly established post-qualifying course in mental health social work at the Institute, Judy Treseder was head of the social work section of the Maudsley Hospital Children’s department. In our discussions, we were perturbed that the research base in our field was, with notable exceptions, generally undeveloped, and it was evident that more sound quality, practice-relevant research was badly needed. We approached David in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Institute for advice. This must have been in about 1980 and was the beginning of our academic association – and subsequent friendship.
Our interests appeared to mesh, as his focus was on adult outcomes of children who had grown up in residential care (Quinton, Rutter, & Liddle, 1984) and those whose parents had psychiatric problems (Quinton, Rutter, & Gulliver, 1990). We were concerned with the development of troubled children placed in foster care and adoptive homes. He first helped us to conduct the small scale study called ‘New parents for older children’ (Rushton, Treseder, & Quinton, 1989) and later to expand this into the Maudsley Adoption and Fostering Study, entitled Joining New Families (Quinton, Rushton, Dance, & Mayes, 1998). This latter study was a 1-year follow-up of maltreated children placed in middle childhood into adoptive families. We wanted to examine how children with multiple behavioural, emotional and social problems fared in their new homes, given their histories of maltreatment and multiple placement changes. We conducted lengthy interviews with the adopters as well as using standard child mental health measures and attempted to define the quality of placement outcomes beyond simple disruption rates. These were representative local authority adoptive placements, not clinic cases, and so we were in a better position to identify the main factors which contributed to poorer placement outcome. We then went on to follow this sample into adolescence (Rushton & Dance, 2006).
I absorbed David’s research experience through the studies we worked on together and subsequently when he was my PhD supervisor. Our research team benefitted from his lucid and critical thinking on such issues as attachment theory, parenting qualities and the careful assessment of developmental progress. Due to his background in anthropology, he stressed the importance of social and cultural influences on human development across the lifespan. He was especially respectful of the immense challenges practitioners faced, as he demonstrated in his scrutiny of the topic of matching children to adoptive parents (Quinton, 2012). He used to compare the multiple factors at play when planning for the individual case with the necessity of reducing the number of variables in the design of a study in order to reach unambiguous conclusions. Research findings, he would say, should be a framework for understanding the individual case, but could rarely be used alone to prescribe a course of action.
The research team often brought practice issues to the table in our meetings, and one of these topics seemed to set the hares running: the quality of evidence on the proposed benefits of contact arrangements with the birth family. A bit of methodological ping pong then followed, much of it appearing in the pages of this journal (Quinton, Rushton, Dance, & Mayes, 1997; Quinton, Selwyn, Rushton, & Dance, 1998, 1999; Ryburn, 1999). The debate resulted in setting out some of the key research conditions for such questions to be answered satisfactorily.
David led us to take great care in establishing what conclusions can safely be drawn from research. A basic principle requires us to ask whether, when factors turn out to be related to each other, one caused the other or whether some other known, or unknown, factor was responsible. (We were amused to learn that the causal fallacy had a Latin tag: cum hoc ergo propter hoc). In the context of placement issues, if siblings placed separately have poorer outcomes, was this due to a poor placement decision or could it be, as we found, that the maltreatment history of this group was different, and this contributed to poorer outcome. Children singled out from siblings for negative treatment and rejected by the birth family appeared to do worse in settling in and developing trust within the adoptive family (Dance, Rushton, & Quinton, 2002; Rushton, Dance, Quinton, & Mayes, 2001).
We continued to apply a number of David’s other research lessons to the adoption and fostering field, for instance that that prospective longitudinal studies produced more reliable data than observational and retrospective studies. Therefore, we built into our data collection the possibility of later follow-ups (Rushton, Treseder, & Quinton, 1995). We often encountered the direction of causality problem. For example, was the negative parenting behaviour responsible for the child’s difficulties or did the child’s difficult behaviour provoke the negative parenting? Furthermore, we learned to be cautious in generalising beyond the characteristics of our specific research sample.
David went on to found the Hadley Centre for adoption and foster care studies at Bristol University, and we embarked on different projects. I have only referred here to his scientific side but it would be remiss not to appreciate, as we all did, his considerably broad literary, film and musical interests and knowledge. To name but one of these: his impeccable taste in female jazz singers.