effects of institutionalisation (romanian orphan study)

• Orphan studies investigate children who have been placed in care because their parents are unable to look after them. An orphan is a child whose parents have either died or have abandoned them permanently.
• Maternal deprivation


  The effects of not having a mother figure
• Psychologists use orphan studies to investigate the effects of maternal deprivation
• Decree 770


  A policy implemented by former President Nicolai Ceausescu in Romania that led to many Romanian parents being unable to afford to keep their children, resulting in them ending up in large orphanages in poor conditions
• After the 1989 revolution, many of the Romanian children were adopted, some by British parents
• Rutter's English and Romanian Adoptee (ERA) Study

  1. Followed a group of 169 Romanian orphans adopted in Britain to test to what extent good care could make up for poor early experiences in institutions

  2. Assessed physical, cognitive and emotional development at ages 4, 6, 11 and 15 years

  3. Used a control group of 52 British children adopted around the same time
• The Bucharest Early Intervention Project (Zeanah et al., 2005)


  1. Assessed attachment in 95 children aged 21-31 months who had spent most of their lives in institutional care, compared to a control group of 50 children who had never lived in an institution

  2. Attachment type was measured using the Strange Situation

  3. Carers were also asked about unusual social behaviour including clingy, attention-seeking behaviour directed inappropriately at all adults
• Disinhibited attachment


  A typical effect of spending time in an institution, where a child is equally friendly and affectionate towards people they know well or who are strangers that they have just met
• Rutter (2006) has explained disinhibited attachment as an adaptation to living with multiple caregivers during the sensitive period for attachment formation
• Damage to intellectual development as a result of institutionalisation can be recovered provided adoption takes place before the age of 6 months - the age at which attachments form
• The studies have now followed up fostered and adopted orphans into their mid-teens and found some lasting effects of early experience
• Romanian orphanages had poor standards of care, especially when it came to forming any relationship with the children, and extremely low levels of intellectual stimulation
• Why might Romanian Orphan studies be generalisable after all?

  One of the methodological issues for Rutter's ERA project is that children were not randomly assigned to conditions
• The researchers did not interfere with the adoption process, which means that those children adopted early may have been more sociable ones, a confounding variable
• In the Bucharest ERA project, to control for such variables, Romanian orphans were randomly allocated to institutional care or fostering


  This is methodologically better because it removes the confounding variable of which children are chosen by parents but it raises ethical issues
• The studies described have now followed up fostered and adopted orphans into their mid-teens and found some lasting effects of early experience, in particular for those adopted late
• However, it is too soon to say with certainty whether children suffered short- or long-term effects
• It may be that the children who spent longer in institutions and currently lag behind in intellectual development or display attachment difficulties may still 'catch up' as adults
• Equally, early-adopted/fostered children who appear to have no issues now may experience emotional problems as adults
• Studying the Romanian orphans has enhanced out understanding of the effects of institutionalisation, such results have led to improvements in the way children are cared for in institutions (Langton, 2006)
• Key worker


  A much smaller number of people, perhaps only one or two, who play a central role for the children in orphanages and children's homes
• Having a key worker means that children have the chance to develop normal attachments and helps avoid disinhibited attachment
• There were many orphan studies before the Romanian orphans become available to study but often these studies involved children who had experiences loss of trauma before they were institutionalised
• These children were often traumatised by their experiences and suffered and bereavement
• It was very hard to observe the effects if institutionalisation in isolation because the children were dealing with multiple factors which functioned as confounding participant variables
• In the case of the Romanian orphans it has been possible to study institutionalisation without these confounding variables, which means the findings have increased internal validity
• Although much useful data about institutionalisation has come out of Romanian orphan studies, it is possible that conditions were so bad that results cannot be applied to understanding the impact of better-quality institutional care of indeed any situation where children experience deprivation
• Romanian orphanages had particularly poor standards of care, especially when it came to forming any relationship with the children, and extremely low levels of intellectual stimulation
• By interfering with the adoption process, already vulnerable children may have been put into a situation that would not suit their individual needs and this negatively affect their well-being
• Long-term effects of early adoption are not clear yet- it is too soon to say with any certainty whether children suffered short or long-term effects because adopted orphans have only been followed into their mid-teens
• For example, early adopted/fostered children who appear to have no issues now, may 'catch-up' (or experience repercussions) as adults