Adoption is a word that is thrown around all too much today in the English language. In 2004, we adopt a greyhound, adopt a soldier overseas, and adopt a tree. Needless to say, all of these uses for "adopt" has led the masses to be distracted as to what adoption truly is. The true definition of child adoption is "a legal proceeding that creates parent-child relations between persons not related by blood; [and] the adopted child is entitled to all privileges belonging to a natural child of the adoptive parents" (Wordnet 2.0 Online. 2004). In my case, this is exactly what adoption means for me as well. I was adopted shortly after birth, never living with my birth parents. A wonderful couple took me into their hearts and home, always telling me that "even though you are not the child of our bodies, you are still the child of our heart." After being adopted over nineteen years ago, it is not something I remember; though it is something I still have questions about. Just as every adolescent questions, "Who am I?" many adopted persons deal with the same lingering thoughts.
[...] This will most likely be the hardest and most time consuming part, because I only want to study an adopted child if I am also able to test both birth parents and both biological parents. Each participant will be offered twenty five dollars and access to the results of the study when finished as a small incentive if they take part in the study. I would then schedule them to come in separately for two hour blocks of time. In the first half hour, I would have a proctor discuss with them what they will be doing, and explain to them that all results will be confidential. [...]
[...] No ethics board would ever pass a study that let experimenters randomly take children away from parents and adopt them to other families. Overall a correlational study would be the most ethical and easiest to accomplish. In terms of expenses, a correlational study would be easiest to do because it is not longitudinal and it involves just one meeting to accomplish the study. There seems to be still much of a debate if adopted children more closely resemble their birth parents or their biological parents. [...]
[...] I believe that there would be a correlation between biological parents and child due to certain genes that influence personality, but I believe that the correlation between adopted parents and their child will prove to be much stronger in some cases. In regards to the Five” test, I do think that emotional stability and open mindedness will be strongly correlated to the adopted parents. These are qualities that you learn as you grown up in a certain environment and are heavily influenced by those who surround a person. [...]
[...] “Adopted children” will be operationalized as children that were adopted before the age of six months and have only been adopted once into a heterosexual, two parent home, and who are from the ages of thirteen to twenty one at the time of the study. Non-adopted children will be children who live with both biological parents, and will also be between the ages of thirteen and twenty one. The dependent variable will be non-physical personality characteristics, such as agreeableness, level of outgoingness, emotional stability, and musical ability. [...]
[...] Research on this is extremely limited and difficult to obtain, perhaps because of the low number of psychologists that research adopted children's personality traits. I would really like to know if there are set traits that are only for genes, or if certain traits are a combination or genes and environment. I personally believe based on my own experiences that most traits are a combination of genes and environment, though there are some things, such as music that have seemingly nothing to do with environment. [...]
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