Successful Adoptive Families: A Longitudinal Study of Special-Needs Adoptions

Abstract

Successful Adoptive Families: A Longitudinal Study of Special-Needs Adoptions. Victor Groze. Westport, CT: Praeger. 1996. 184 pp. ISBN 0-275-95343-2. $49.95 cloth. Special-needs adoptions are characterized by the existence of some qualities about either the adopted child (e.g., learning disabilities, physical handicaps) or the circumstances surrounding the adoption (e.g., sibling groups, history of abuse) that make placement or subsequent adjustment more challenging for all parties to the adoption. In this book, Victor Groze handily crafts a theoretical model that addresses both stressors and resources experienced by families with specialneeds adoptions at four levels: the adopted child subsystem, the family system, the service system, and the community system. In 1990, the author began a longitudinal study involving a systematic sample of 199 Iowa families experiencing subsidized special-needs adoptions. Data were derived both from self-report instruments and from an interview. The interview included an activity in which families constructed a social network map. The book reports results from a subset of 71 families who eventually participated in all four occasions of annual data collection. These families did not have significantly different demographic qualities from those of the larger sample, nor from the population from which the sample was drawn. This study nicely addresses some methodological limitations that have existed in previous work, but it leaves one rather important question unanswered: Were the special needs in the 71 families particularly different from the special needs in the families who did not complete the study? Beginning at the innermost level, Groze examined characteristics of the adopted children. In general, the children in the study had behavior difficulties, some of which worsened during the study. For example, over half the children had more internalizing, externalizing, and total problem behaviors at the end of the study than at the beginning. Children who had experienced physical or sexual abuse or both had more attachment difficulties and problematic behavior than children who had not experienced abuse. Groze examined oucomes of groups of siblings placed together versus siblings separated at placement. This is an important issue because the majority of children who are not infants and who are awaiting adoption are in sibling groups. Thus, considerable concern exists about whether strengths resulting from placing siblings together outweigh the difficulties of finding a home for a group of children. Groze concluded that this study provides limited support (p. …