Finding answers to the common identity questions “where have I come from” and “who am I now” can be complicated for adopted young people because of the discontinuity of their family membership across time. For young people adopted from the care system, answering these questions often entails considering their own history of adversity, and a range of difficulties presented and encountered by their birth parents. Ongoing contact with birth family members as well as openness of communication within the adoptive family are potential ways of helping adopted young people construct their sense of identity. This presentation will draw on interview data with 32 adopted young people to explore pathways to adoptive identity development in late adolescence. It will explore the factors that can help young people achieve a cohesive sense of self as an adopted person, and the reasons why other young people experience frustration and confusion about their identity.
The presentation draws on data from a longitudinal study of children domestically adopted in the UK when under the age of four. The study has involved three waves of data collection - in early childhood, middle childhood and late adolescence. The focus of the study was the experience and impact of birth family contact arrangements on adopted children/young people and their birth and adoptive parents, and children who were planned to have either letter or face-to-face contact with adult birth relatives were included. The young people had been placed for adoption at an average age of 21 months old, and the majority of the sample had been adopted from the care system and had experienced, or been at risk of experiencing, significant harm in their birth families.
In wave three of the study, 32 adopted young people (age 14 to 22, mean age 18; 16 male, 16 female) took part in in-depth semi-structured interviews which explored their experiences and perceptions of adoption and of the openness they had experienced within their adoptive family and with their birth family. The stage that young people had reached in their adoptive identity development was explored qualitatively using the whole interview, drawing on Grotevant & Von Korff’s (2011) work on narrative identity, and four patterns of identity formation were identified: cohesive identity; developing identity; unexplored identity; and fragmented identity (Neil, Beek and Ward 2015). Young people in the cohesive identity group had experienced the highest levels of openness in their adoption, both in terms of ongoing contact with birth relatives and the adoption communication openness of their parents, but these factors alone were insufficient to explain the all individual variations in identity formation.
This presentation will focus on the findings from further thematic analysis of adoptive young people’s interviews. The aim of this analysis was to explore factors that had helped young people move towards identity coherence, and factors that created barriers in building identity. This analysis offers a nuanced view from the perspective of adopted young people themselves of how their identity development was shaped by openness practices, particularly in the context of parent-child relationships. It also reveals a wide range of other factors influencing identity development. These included factors within the individual (e.g. age, interest in family heritage, emotional sensitivity), the peer group (e.g. confiding relationships, bullying, meeting adopted peers, sibling interactions) and professional support systems (e.g. life story work, counselling, support with contact). An ecological model of adoptive identity development will be proposed and implications for practice with young people separated from their birth families though adoption and other permanent placements will be discussed.
Family foster care and adoption , Transition to adulthood from care
