| There is little research that examines attitudes contributing to change in contact within open adoption arrangements. This investigation drew from the first and second waves of data collected from the Minnesota-Texas Adoption Research Project. Data from 50 adoptive mothers and 50 adoptive fathers involved in ongoing-mediated open adoption arrangements were compared from wave one to wave two by analyzing the individual Adoptive Parent Interviews. This study investigated whether adoptive parents' attitudes toward their child's birthmother could account for one set of adoptive parents moving from ongoing-mediated arrangements to stopping contact with the birthmother, one set remaining ongoing-mediated, and one set of adoptive parents moving from ongoing-mediated arrangements to fully-disclosed arrangements with the birthmother. Discriminant function analysis found that, for adoptive mothers, empathy toward the birthmother, acknowledgment of difference of the adoptive family, and satisfaction with control in the present, did not predict changes in contact or discriminate between the three groups (data from adoptive fathers could not be used in the final analyses because of lack of variance in some predictors). Approximately 86% of the variance between the groups was accounted for by other factors. An exploratory post-hoc qualitative analysis was performed with three adoptive mother interviews, one from each group and controlled for responses, to identify other emergent factors that may have accounted for the changes in contact. These factors included the role of the mediator, structural changes within the adoptive and birth families, developmental changes in the adopted child, and other life events and stressors within the adoptive kinship network. |
