2.10. Institutionalisation

Question 1

What was happening in Romania in the 90s?

Answer 1

• Former President forbade women under 40 with less than 4 children to use contraception or have an abortion.
• Many people couldn’t afford to keep their children and they ended up in huge orphanages or in very poor conditions
• After 1989 revolution, many of children were adopted

Question 2

Rutter: English and Romanian Adoptees procedure

Answer 2

• Group of 165 Romanian orphans adopted in Britain - wanted to test to what extent good care could make up for poor early experience in institutions
• Some adopted before 6 months, others all adopted before 4.
• Physical, cognitive and emotional development assessed at 4, 6, 11 and 15 yrs.

Question 3

Findings of Rutter’s study

Answer 3

• Upon arrival in UK, half of adoptees showed signs of mental retardation and the majority were severely undernourished.
• At age 11, the mean IQ for orphans adopted before 6 months was 102 compared with 86 for those adopted between 6 months and 2 yrs and 77 for those adopted after 2 yrs. These diffs were still there at age 16.
• Children adopted after 6 months showed signs of disinhibited attachment whereas those children adopted before 6 months rarely did.

Question 4

Conclusions of Rutter’s study

Answer 4

• The findings support Bowlby’s view that there is a sensitive period in the development of attachments and a failure to form an attachment before the age of 6 months and after 2 yrs appears to have long lasting effects

Question 5

Zeanah et al procedure:

Answer 5

• 95 children ages 12-31 months who had spent most of their time in institutional care.
• Compared to a control group of 50 children that had never been institutionalised.
• Attachment type was measured using the strange situation and carers were asked about unusual social behaviours.

Question 6

Zeanah et al findings:

Answer 6

• 74% of the control were securely attached
• 19% of institutionalised group were securely attached
• 65% of the institutionalised group had disorganised attachment
• 44% of institutionalised group had disinhibited attachment

Question 7

What is physical underdevelopment?

Answer 7

Gardner found that lack of emotional care leads to deprivation dwarfism

Question 8

What is damage to intellectual development?

Answer 8

• Cognitive development is affected by emotional deprivation
• Can be reversed if adopted before 6 months

Question 9

What is disinhibited attachment?

Answer 9

A form of insecure attachment, a child will treat a stranger with inappropriate familiarity and may be attention seeking.

Question 10

What is poor parenting?

Answer 10

Quinton compared a group of 50 women brought up in institutions with a control group.
When in their 20s, women reared in institutions experience extreme difficulties acting as their parents; their children went on to spend time in care.

Question 11

Strength: RWA

Answer 11

• Most babies are now adopted in the first couple of weeks of birth as research shows children and adoptive mothers as just as securely attached as non-adoptive families.
• It has helped children’s homes, making sure caregiver to child ratio is a lot smaller, and assigning a key worker to enable normal attachments to develop
• Means that children in institutional care have a chance to develop normal attachments and disinhibited attachment is avoided

Question 12

Strength: fewer confounding variables than other

Answer 12

• There were many orphan studies before the Romanian orphans became available to study
• Neglect, abuse and bereavement made it hard to observe the effects of institutionalisation
• The children were affected by these confounding variables- Rutter’s study has fewer confounding variables.
• Means we can be fairly sure that diffs in institutionally cared for children are the rest of this type of care.
• However, Romanian orphan studies may have new confounding variables because quality of care was so poor, making it hard to separate effects of institutional care from the of poor institutional care
• This means the internal validity might not be better than in previous studies after all.

Question 13

Weakness: lack of data on adult development

Answer 13

• It’s too soon to say for certain whether children suffered permanent effects because we only have data on their development up to their early 20s.
• Due to when this took place, it will be some time before we have information about some key research questions
• This means the Romanian orphan studies have not yet yielded their most important findings, some children may catch up.

Question 14

Evaluation extra- social sensitivity

Answer 14

• Late adopted children were shown to have low IQ- this might subsequently affect how they’re treated by parents, teachers etc and might create a self fulfilling prophecy.
• On the other hand, much has been learned from the Romanian orphan studies that might benefit future institutionalised or potentially institutionalised children.
• So potential benefits of the studies probably outweigh the social sensitivity.