AO3

• Real world application

  • Today most babies are to be adopted in the first couple of weeks of birth as research shows children and adoptive mothers as just securely attached as non adoptive families
  • Also has helped children’s homes, making sure caregiver to child ratio is a lot smalller and assigning a key worker to enable normal attachments to form
  • This means that children in institutional care have a chance to develop normal attachments and disinhibited attachment is avoided
• Evidential basis

  • Rutters study has fewer confounding variables than other research into the effects of institutionalisation - There were many orphan studies before the Romanian orphans
  • The children were affected by these confounding variables. Rutgers study has fewer confounding variables meaning we can be fairly sure that differences in institutionally cared for children are the rest of this type of care (high internal validity)
• Lack of longditudional data

  • 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 info about some key research questions - This means the Romanian orphan studies have not yet yielded their most important findings, some children may ‘catch up’ it is an incomplete study for which the findings and conclusions may not maintain
• social sensitivity

  • Late adopted children were shown to have low IQ - this might subsequently affect how they are treated by parents, teachers etc. And create self fulfilling prophecy
  • However, much has been learned to help institutionalised children. Overall, the potential benefits of the studies probably outweigh the costs