3.5.2 Romanian Orphan Studies: Effects of Institutionalisation

Institutionalisation: This is used to describe the effects of living in institutional settings (such as a hospital or an orphanage) where people may live in institutions for long periods of time with little or no emotional care. Research in attachment looks into the effect of institutionalisation on a child's attachment and development.

KEY STUDY: Rutter et al. 2007 – Romanian Orphan study

A natural, longitudinal experiment where 165 Romanian orphans were adopted in Britain (111 adopted before the age of 2 and 54 adopted before the age of 4) to test to what extent good care could make up for the poor early experiences in institutions.

• Cognitive development, behavioural development and emotional development were assessed.

Findings:

Age of adoption = a key factor in attachment type:

• Those adopted before 6 months, showed signs of a secure 'normal' attachment Those older than 6 months displayed disinhibited attachment (overly friendly behaviour towards unknown adults)

The mean IQ scores:

• adopted before 6 months = 102
• adopted between 6 months and 2 years = 86
• adopted after the age of 2 = 77

Caregiver sensitivity:

Securely attached infants have mothers who are more sensitive, accepting and cooperative to the needs of a child

Insecure attachment - moths are unresponsive to crying and less affectionate

Insecure avoidant - mothers are more rejective, paying less attention to children

Insecure-resistant - mothers tended to be occupied with routine activities when holding the child

Criticisms of Caregiver Sensitivity

Temperament hypothesis

Kagan 1984 argues that certain personality or temperamental characteristics of a child can impact a mother's responsiveness to a child.

Evaluation

A limitation is the generalisability of Romanian studies. Romanian orphanages had pretty bad standards of care especially when it came to forming an attachment with a child. May not apply to other institutions.

On the other hand, a strength of Romanian studies is their application to improve conditions for children growing outside their family home. Studying the Romanian orphans improved psychologists' understanding of early institutional care and how to prevent the worst of effects. This has led to improvements in conditions experienced by children such as children in care systems having fewer caregivers allocated per child. In addition, institutional care is now seen as an undesirable option and effort is put to have people fostered or adopted. Gives a chance for children to form normal attachments and avoid disinhibited attachments.

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A strength is the lack of confounding variables. Other studies before Romanian orphan studies often involved a vast array of confounding variables such as orphans who had experienced loss or trauma before being institutionalised. It's hard to detangle the different effects of neglect, abuse + bereavement meant it was hard to observe the effects of institutionalisation alone. In the case of Romanian studies, it is possible to study the effect of institutionalisation without the confounding variables as most were abandoned at birth.

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A limitation is children were not randomly assigned to conditions. Rutter et al didn't interfere with the adoption process so those adopted early may have been more sociable → confounding variable. Can be an issue methodologically as it can result in researcher bias and reduce the reliability of the results.