Transracial, same-race adoptions, and the need for multiple measures of adolescent adjustment.

Using a multimeasure approach, the current study investigated 12 indices of academic, familial, psychological, and health outcomes for 4 groups of transracial and same-race adopted adolescents. A secondary analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health data showed that Asian adolescents adopted by White parents had both the highest grades and the highest levels of psychosomatic symptoms, whereas Black adolescents adopted by Black parents reported the highest levels of depression. Intriguingly, and by contrast, Black adoptees reported higher levels of self-worth than non-Black adoptees. The implications of the findings for future investigations of transracial adoption are discussed.

Youth problems among adoptees living in one-parent homes: a comparison with others from one-parent biological families.

Exploring how rising family dissolutions affect adopted children, the authors investigated 2 competing viewpoints: (a) a double jeopardy hypothesis, positing adoptees are susceptible to heightened risks of adjustment problems because of a compounding of parental losses, versus (b) a buffering hypothesis, suggesting early birth parent losses buffer an adoptee's ability to accept parental loss from divorce. With data from the 1994 National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health, 2003), the authors compared adaptations of adolescent adoptees living with 1 adoptive parent (n=143) with those of children living in step- or single-parent biological families (n=7,457) in a nationally representative sample. Results were mixed, showing some support for both hypotheses and mostly nonsignificant differences on the largest number of behavioral comparisons made.

The effects of children on parents: adoptee genetic dispositions and adoptive parent psychopathology.

Although the traditional focus in socialization research has been on the effect of parents on their children (Finley, 1999), recently, researchers have turned their attention to the effects of children on their parents (Ambert, 1992; Demick, Bursik, & Dibiase, 1993). An important confound in the study of the effects of children on parents, however, is shared genetic or biological heritage. One method of avoiding this confound is for researchers to study adoptees and adoptive parents who have no shared genetic heritage. We, therefore, designed the present secondary analysis to examine the effects of adopted children on their adoptive parents without confounding shared biological heritage.

Perceived Parental Relationships and Health-Risk Behaviors in College-Attending Emerging Adults.

The present study investigated the association of perceived parenting with health-risk behaviors in an ethnically diverse sample of 1,728 college-attending emerging adults. Participants completed retrospective measures of perceived maternal and paternal nurturance, connection, psychological control, and disrespect and reported their frequency of binge drinking, illicit drug use, unsafe sexual behavior, and impaired driving. Multivariate Poisson regression analyses indicated that perceived paternal acceptance was associated inversely with 6 of the 12 health-risk behaviors measured, whereas perceived mothering was related only to 2 of these health-risk behaviors. These patterns were consistent across gender, ethnicity, and family structure.

Adolescent adjustment in a nationally collected sample: identifying group differences by adoption status, adoption subtype, developmental stage and gender.

The current study investigated group differences in adolescent adjustment by adoption status and adoption subtype in a national sample, in contrast to group differences based on developmental stage or gender. Secondary analyses of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health were performed to describe group differences in a broad range of adjustment measures (a) between adoptees and non-adoptees, (b) between different-race adoptees and same-race adoptees and, (c) across adolescent developmental stage and gender groups. Based upon a developmental deviance hypothesis, the current study hypothesized that early adolescent different-race adoptees would fair better across measures of academic performance, familial relationships, psychological adjustment, and physical health than their middle and late adolescent counterparts. Group comparisons revealed little evidence of increased maladjustment among adopted adolescents compared to non-adopted study participants. In addition, group comparisons revealed few differences across indices of adolescent adjustment by adoption subtype (i.e. by the degree of racial congruence adopted child and adoptive parent). However, significant group differences in adolescent adjustment were found based on participants' developmental stage and gender. The implications of the findings are discussed.