National Survey Findings

The evidence from the National Child Development Study of the National Children's Bureau in London has provided the fullest and most comprehensive data available in Britain on outcome in adoption, Three major reports have appeared from the NCB on this topic: Seglow, Kellmer Pringle and Wedge's Growing up adopted, and Crellin, Kellmer Pringle and West's Born illegitimate: social and educational implications, published in 1972and 1971 respectively by the National Foundation for Educational Research, and Lambert and Streather's Children in changing families: a study of adoption and illegitimacy published this autumn by MacMillan Press and reviewed by Dr Alexina McWhinnie on page 62. The National Child Development Study includes some 16,000 children born in one week in March, 1958. These children were studied extensively at birth, and again when they were aged seven, 11 and 16 years old. The first two NCB books on adoption and illegitimacy were based on the data collected at birth, and when the children were seven. By the age of seven, some 180 children born to single mothers had been adopted, but some 450 children in the survey either remained with single mothers, or were in institutions of various kinds, or with relatives. Two comparisons were made, between the adopted children, the non-adopted children of single parents, and the remaining children. The results of these comparisons indicated that the adopted children at birth shared with illegitimate children a greater number of physical disadvantages associated with pregnancy and birth, as well as an excess of congenital handicaps of various kinds. However, by the age of seven the adopted children had largely overcome these early handicaps, and were much more similar to the majority of the children in the birth cohort than they were to the non-adopted, illegitimate children. Moreover, on some measures of intellectual achievement the adopted children were functioning at a superior level when compared with the main group in the cohort. The main implications of this study were that although some problems of adjustment were apparent, by and large these adopted children at age seven were functioning remarkably well in comparison with similar children who had not been adopted. The study carried the policy implication that adoption had powerful advantages for children born into disadvantaged circumstances. It is clearly important that the progress of these children should be monitored as they grow older, and this is possible because of the periodic follow-ups of the total cohort carried out by the National Children's Bureau. As indicated above, a description of the adopted children's progress when they were aged 11 was published this autumn in Children in changing families: a study of adoption and illegitimacy by Lydia Lambert and Jane Streather. The information which this volume reveals is of considerable interest to researchers. Further research strategies in this field have become possible since the National Children's Bureau has made available to researchers the basic data of the National Child Development Study, by depositing it with the Social Science Research Council Data Archive at the University of Essex. We have therefore been able to analyse data from the birth survey and the follow-ups at age seven and II by obtaining a magnetic tape with 450 variables selected from the much larger number listed in the NCB code books for the survey. The tape has been analysed by the Statistical Program for the Social Sciences, and run at the University of Manchester Regional Computer Centre. Our analyses have been undertaken independently of the National Children's Bureau' analyses, and we did not have sight, in preparing this paper, of the manuscript of the NCB's latest book on this topic. The interested reader should therefore compare the brief analysis