Browsing by Author "Lappalainen, Petra-Sif Markkusdottir"

Objective. International adoption concerns large groups of children each year. International adoptees often have developmental delays or deficits in the social and physical domains due to depriving early living conditions. The atypical development of attachment has been of special interest in the population of adopted children. The purpose of the present study is to explore the possible connections between an adoptee's background factors and the symptoms or behaviors indicating disordered attachment. This study is part of the ongoing Finnish Adoption Study. Procedure. The chosen background variables were adoptee's gender, continent of origin, the number and form of placements before adoption, and adoptee's age at adoption. Symptoms of disordered attachment were evaluated with a questionnaire developed for this study. The items represented the two types of attachment disorder, disinhibited and inhibited, defined in the DSM-IV-TR and ICD-10. In addition, two items concerned clingy behavior. Adoptive parents filled out the questionnaire as a part of a larger questionnaire concerning the background and health of the adoptee in general (n=1450). The questionnaire was mailed to all the parents who had adopted a child internationally between the years 1985 and 2007. The relationships between the variables were investigated using linear regression and two-way analysis of variance. Results and conclusions. The results showed that adoptee's gender, continent of origin and adoptee's age at adoption were connected to disinhibited symptoms. Living in a single orphanage and the continents Asia and Africa were related to inhibited symptoms. Only Asia of the explored variables was related to clingy behavior. Based on the results it was concluded that different kind of attachment related behavior problems might have different kind of developmental paths. The results of this study can be utilized in future research to find out more detailed information about the development of disordered attachment behavior in adopted children. The results are important for the provision of well-informed information to adoptive parents.