romanian orphan studies

• Institutionalisation


  The effects of living in an institutional setting for a long period of time
• Institutions


  • Places where people live for a long period of time and do not go home in the evening, e.g. orphanages, hostels, hospitals
• Privation


  When children have never formed an attachment, more likely to happen in institutions with poor emotional care
• Types of institutions


  • Hostels
  • Orphanages
  • Hospitals
• Deprivation vs Privation


  Deprivation is the lack of emotional care, privation is never forming an attachment
• Studying Romanian orphans has enhanced our understanding of institutionalisation
• Results from studying Romanian orphans have led to improvements in the way children are cared for in orphanages
• Key worker


  One or two people assigned to a child in an orphanage, allows child to develop normal attachments and avoid disinhibited attachments
• Studying children dealing with multiple factors (e.g. loss, trauma) before institutionalisation


  Brings in confounding participant variables and makes it hard to observe the effect of institutionalisation in isolation
• Romanian orphans experienced particularly poor standards of care and low intellectual stimulation


  Results cannot be applied to understand the impact of better quality institutional care
• Rutter's ERA project did not randomly assign children to institutional care vs fostering


  Children adopted early may have been more sociable, a confounding variable
• Bucharest Early Intervention project randomly allocated orphans to conditions


  This is methodologically better but also an ethical issue as it intentionally put some children into a potentially harmful situation
• Rutter and Bucharest studies followed orphans to mid-teens and found effects of institutionalisation, but long-term effects are unknown
• Children who spent longer in institutions and lagged behind may catch up, and children adopted early may experience emotional problems as adults