Study title

United Kingdom

Individual

Family

Participants were recruited using a range of methods. Adoption UK, an adoptive parent membership organisation, sent out mailings to their members about the study. The Post Adoption Centre, who work with all parties affected by adoption, also sent out mailings. Recruitment was also via snowball sampling, including via the professional contacts of the research team and through participants telling other members of their family about the study. The study was publicised on social media (Facebook and Twitter). Thus this was a convenience sample, and may have reached primarily families in touch with adoption organisations, or following adoption -related people or content on social media. Primarily recruitment was focused on people who were adopted or who adopted a child from 1989 onwards, this coinciding with a period of policy promoting the adoption of children from the care system in England and Wales. We aimed to recruit primarily people adopted through the child protection system, but without excluding other forms of adoption such as “relinquished” infants, and overseas adoptions (hence reflecting how adoption has mainly been used since 1989 in England and Wales). Study design, and recruitment were informed through consultation with four stakeholder groups: adopted adults who are parents; adoptive parents who are grandparents; professionals working in adoption; academic advisory group. A quota sampling method was used to ensure that the study recruited a diverse range of individuals as our aim was to hear about a wide range of possible experiences. The first consideration was gender-we recruited roughly equal numbers of men and women. It proved harder to recruit adopted men who were fathers to the study, and in order to recruit 20 adopted men, the research team needed to be flexible in terms of when the father was adopted. This resulted in the sample of adopted fathers generally being older than the mothers, adopted in the more distant past, and more likely to be adopted as “relinquished” infants compared to the mothers (reflecting the historical period in which they were adopted). The adopted fathers therefore had a higher mean age at interview, but a lower mean age at adoption compared to the adopted mothers. Because we were aiming to hear from individuals with a wide range of experiences of adoption, other characteristics that we deliberately set out to ensure were included in the adopted parents and adoptive grandparents sample were: adoptions over the age of five; adoption of sibling groups; transracial adoptions; adoption by single parents or foster parents; adopted adults and adoptive parents who had become estranged from each other; adopted parents who were not living with their children (for example because the child was in care, adopted, or living with another parent or relative); people from ethnic minority groups, adoptions where there had been ongoing birth family contact; adopted adults who became parents as teenagers. In discussion with stakeholder groups, quotas were set for the minimum number of people in the above categories to be included in the sample. Towards the end of data collection this meant that we needed to turn some participants away in order to reserve places in the study for people with particular characteristics.Participants were interviewed using an adapted version of McAdams life story interview method. This asks the person to describe their life now, before telling the story of their life in chapters, including being adopted (or adopting) and becoming a parent (or grandparent). A series of questions about 'key scenes' in their life follow, such as high points, low points, turning points and key challenges. Final questions are specific to this study and focus on family dynamics including birth family relationships and support services. Some participants were from the same family e.g. adoptive mother, adoptive father and adopted daughter in one family may have all been interviewed. Information about which cases are linked is provided as there are extra ethical issues involved in analysing at the family level. Where people from the same family took part, they were always interviewed separately. Almost all interviews were carried out face-to-face,a small number took place during the pandemic in 2020, and these were carried out using video calling. Interviews ranged in length from 1 hour to 5 hours, grandparent interviews tending to be longer. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and anonymised.Ethical approval for the study was granted by the University of East Anglia School of Social Work Research ethics committee.