Adoption Studies

• What is the idea behind adoption studies?

  To explain crime in the comparison with criminals with both their biological parents ad their adoptive parents and if the impact of nature or nurture is the result of criminals
• What do studies look at?

  If children are more similar to their adoptive parents this suggests that nurture - environment - is a key factor to crime however, if children are more similar to their biological parents then this suggests their is a nature - genetic - link
• Crowe (1972)


  Studied adopted children, found that children with criminal biological mother had a 50% risk of criminality by 18, with 5% for non-criminal mother children.
• Hutchings and Mednick (1975)


  Studied 14,000 adopted children and found a high proportion of boys with criminal convictions had biological parents with criminal convictions too.

  This suggests that there is a strong link between genetics and criminality.
• Strength - Studies support the view that crime...

  ...can be explained genetically
• Strength - Adoption studies overcome the problem faced by twin studies, where biologically identical twins are brought up together...


  ...making it impossible to separate out the influence of genes from environment
• Limitation - Many children are not adopted immediately after birth meaning...

  ...it won't be easy to tell if environment or biology is the true cause of criminality
• Limitation - The adoption process is not always random and children may be placed with parents that have similar attributes to their biological parents...


  ...this means that the similar environments may produce similar behaviour