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The UK Department of Education has study called "Supporting Post-Adoption Contact in Complex Cases" to research topics including: 1. What are the characteristics of adoptive parents, adopted children and birth relatives who are involved in complex direct contact arrangements? 2. What are the experiences of adoptive parents and birth relatives of direct contact arrangements? 3. What types of services to support contact are birth relatives and adoptive parents using? 4. What are adoptive parents and birth relativesҒ experiences of using contact support services? 5. How much do support services for direct contact cost? A new study was released in June 2010 on supporting post-adoption contact in complex cases. Here are some excerpts: About birth parents' experiences:"On the coping with adoption measure, over 70% of birth relatives scored mainly high or very high on acceptance of dual connectionё. Three-quarters of birth relatives felt very positive about how the adoption had worked out for the child. On the dimension of dealing with the impact of adoption on selfђ, 60% of birth relatives still had some or quite significant problems in managing the negative consequences of adoption, for example dealing with difficult feelings and re-engaging with wider life activities such as employment, education and social activities." (page 4).About adoptees' experiences: "Some children were doing very well but other children in the study were continuing to struggle with the impact of their early histories, and they had ongoing psychological issues or developmental problems that could make them vulnerable in terms of handling complex contact situations. For example, 44% of the children had emotional or behavioural problems, over half (51%) were reported by their parents to have very complicated feelings about their birth family and about their status as an adopted person, and 29% had problems in their relationship with their adoptive parents." (page 4). About adoptive parents' experiences:""In the adoptive parent sample, in 42-45% of cases contact arrangements were classified as working very wellђ where very few problems had been experienced and where adoptive parents were very positive about the comfort and value of contact for themselves and their child. However, in 55-58% of cases the contact arrangements had unresolved issues." (page 5). It's hard to tell from the study whether the difficulties are due to poor management of post-adoption contact, whether post-adoption contact is just plain traumatic regardless of how well managed or other factors. Here's the research brief: [URL="http://www.education.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/DFE-RBX-10-04.pdf"]http://www.education.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/DFE-RBX-10-04.pdf[/URL] Or you can go to the UK's Dept of Education web site, click 'research' and then 'publications'.
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