effect of institutionalisation on attachment

• • Institutionalisation effects of growing up in an orphanage or children's home. lack of emotional care = unable to form attachments
  • Rutter wanted to find the effects that growing up in an institution had on children.
• • In his study, he followed 165 Romanian orphans in a longitudinal natural study.
  • 110 of them were adopted before the age of 2 and 50 by the age of 4.
  • He assessed their physical, cognitive and emotional development after they had been adopted by British families. compared to a group of 50 British children who had been adopted before 6 months, acting as a control.
• • He found that the Romanian orphans had severe physical, cognitive and emotional development issues. orphans were undernourished and had significantly lower IQ's. They also have disinhibited attachment. 
  • by the age of 4 most of the children who were adopted before the age of 6 months had caught up with their British counterparts, however, those who were adopted after this hadn't
• lacks external validity, quality of the care was so poor in Romanian orphanages that it can't be compared to others. e harmful effects may represent the effects of poor institutional care rather than institutional care in general. lacks generalisability.
• • allowed psychologists to study the real-life causes and effects of institutionalised adoption,typically incredibly hard to study. due to the children involved being neglected and subject to abuse, which would otherwise be extremely unethical to study artificially.
• • suggestions that the effects can be reversed, disproving the assumption that the effects are irreversible. eg, Hodges and Tizard also studied Romanian orphans found that children who had been adopted by adequate families often coped better on measures of behavioural and peer relationships than those children who returned to their biological families. effects not always detrimental.
• • real life application to social services. helped change the way that children were looked after, the adoption process. Historically, mothers were encouraged to keep their babies for a substantial period by which time the critical period for attachment formation may have passed. Nowadays, infants are adopted as early as one week old and singer et al states that children are securely attached to their adoptive mothers and biologically related families.