1. Disparities Among Adolescents in Foster Care
Adoption Status and Social Network Inequality:
Disparities Among Adolescents in Foster Care
Richard S. Carbonaro
Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Introduction
Measures (continued)
Results
Outcomes:
In-Degree: Number of schoolmates who consider the respondent a friend.
Out-Degree: Number of schoolmates respondent considers friends.
Bonacich Centrality: Degree of local social influence within a network.
Subjective Acceptance: Degree to which the respondent feels accepted within their school.
Isolate: Respondents who reported having no friends.
Control Variables:
Demographics: Race, biological sex, age, class (parental education, poverty status, and neighborhood risk were used as separate indicators).
Family Controls: Closeness with resident mother, closeness with resident father, parental involvement in the child’s life, whether resident parent were married or in a marriage-like relationship, number of siblings, and number of extended kin living in household.
Closeness scales were constructed using: how close they felt to parent, parental warmness, level of communication overall relationship satisfaction. The scales for father-child and mother-child relationships used the same items, with respective alphas of 0.89 and 0.76.
This study examines the social integration of children who were adopted or in foster care.
A lack of social integration affects developmental (Schneider, 2016), health (Thoits, 2011; Hostinar et al., 2015), economic (Bourdieu, 2011 [1986]), and a slew of other outcomes.
Although attachment and social competence have received attention, the larger social network outcomes of these children has received little attention.
Informed by the lens of insecure attachment (Bretherton, 1992; Bowlby 1969), this study explores the impact of adoption status and family factors on the social network outcomes.
In this study, I compare the social network outcomes of foster children with both children raised in their biological homes, and with adopted children.
Hypotheses:
Adopted and foster children will have fewer friends, have less influence, and perceive less social support than children raised in their biological homes.
Alternatively, only foster children may experience this negative effect.
Children in foster care have fewer friends, less social influence, and perceive less social support than adopted children.
These inequalities between adopted and nonadopted children will be explained by family structure and processes.
While foster children were less socially integrated, adopted children were not.
Children adopted out of foster care experienced a negative association before controls, but this was explained by demographics.
Post hoc tests suggest a significant difference between foster and adopted children across all network outcomes except isolate status.
Family factors did not play as strong a role as initially hypothesized.
Notably, parental involvement and the father-child relationship affected social outcomes, but the mother-child relationship had little impact.
Discussion
As one of the first studies looking at social network outcomes in a representative random sample, these findings suggest adoption serves as an intervention to aid healthy attachment patterns and social development during adolescence.
Permanence had a stronger association with positive outcomes than other family factors including closeness and involvement.
The father-child relationship remains important to social development, supporting the claims of Schneider (2016).
Parental involvement is also vital, though less explored in the literature.
Outcomes Across Adoption Status
Model 1
Model 2
Model 3
Adoption Status
+ Demographics
+ Family Controls
Coef. SE
In-degree (n=10,310)
Negative Binomial Regression; unit = number of incoming friendship nominations
Foster Children
-1.81***
0.46
-1.53***
0.33
-1.36***
0.34
Previous Foster
-1.46*
0.60
-0.64
0.63
-0.71
0.64
Private Adoption
-0.39
-0.33
0.39
-0.38
Out-Degree (n=10,310)
Ordinary Least Squares; unit = number of outgoing friendship nominations
-1.20**
0.40
-0.96**
0.32
-0.83**
-0.47
-0.13
0.56
-0.20
0.58
0.22
0.41
0.53
0.38
0.50
Bonacich Centrality (n=10,310)
Negative Binomial Regression; unit = power units (see Bonacich, 1987)
-0.26***
0.07
-0.22***
0.06
-0.19**
-0.12
0.11
-0.03
-0.04
0.01
0.09
0.04
0.10
Perceived Acceptance (n=10,310)
Ordinary Least Squares; unit = scale units
-0.35**
0.13
-0.32*
-0.31*
0.02
0.12
-0.01
0.03
Isolate Status (n=10,058)
Logistic Regression; unit = Odds Ratio
2.90***
0.66
2.36*
0.85
2.19*
0.83
1.83*
0.51
2.11
1.42
2.28
1.61
0.90
0.24
0.73
0.42
0.80
0.43
* p<0.05; ** p<0.01; *** p<0.001
Sample
Conclusions
This study uses the AddHealth dataset (children in grades 7-12)
10,310 adolescents were included in this representative U.S. school-based sample.
Includes items from the Wave 1 in-school, Wave 1 in-home, and Wave 3 in-home interviews.
Due to the distribution of the data, different techniques were used (see Table 1)
Adoption into a permanent family may afford children a resource allowing for more comfort in making friends. The permanency of the family appears to be the key factor in the social development of these children, more important than closeness to their parents, social class, and other family factors.
References
Measures
Bowlby John. Attachment and loss: Vol. 1: Attachment. New York: Basic Books; 1969.
Bonacich, P. (1987). Power and centrality: A family of measures. American journal of sociology, 92(5),
Bourdieu, Pierre The forms of capital  Cultural theory: An anthology, 1,
Bretherton, Inge “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.” Developmental psychology 28(5):
Fan, Xitao, Brent C. Miller, Matthew Christensen, Kyung-Eun Park, Harold D. Grotevant, Manfred van Dulmen, M., Nora Dunbar, and Bruce Bayley “Questionnaire and Interview Inconsistencies Exaggerated Differences Between Adopted and Non-Adopted Adolescents in a National Sample.” Adoption Quarterly 6(2): 7-27.
Farr, Rachel H., and Harold Grotevant. (in press). Adoption. In B. Fiese (Ed.), APA Handbook of Contemporary Family Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Harris, Kathleen Mullan, Carolyn Tucker Halpern, Eric Whitsel, John Hussey, Joyce Tabor, Pamela Entzel, and J. Richard Udry “The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health: Research Design.”
Hostinar, Camelia, Anna E. Johnson, and Megan R. Gunnar “Early Social Deprivation and the Social Buffering of Cortisol Stress Responses in Late Childhood: An Experimental Study.” Developmental psychology 51(11): 1597.
Schneider, H. Barry  Childhood friendships and peer relations: Friends and enemies. New York: Routledge.
Thoits, Peggy A “Mechanisms Linking Social Ties and Support to Physical and Mental Health.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 52(2):
Van den Dries, Linda, Femmie Juffer, Marinus H. van IJzendoorn, and Marian J. Bakermans-Kranenburg “Fostering security? A Meta-Analysis of Attachment in Adopted Children.” Children and youth services review 31(3):
Van Londen, W. Monique, Femmie Juffer, and Marinus H. van IJzendoorn “Attachment, Cognitive, and Motor Development in Adopted Children: Short-Term Outcomes After International Adoption.” Journal of Pediatric Psychology 32(10):
Vorria, Panayiota, Zaira Papaligoura, Jamin Sarafidou, Maria Kopakaki, Judy Dunn, Marinus H. van IJzendoorn, and Antigoni Kontopoulou “The Development of Adopted Children After Institutional Care: A Follow‐Up Study.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 47(12),
Independent Variables:
The triangulation technique set forth by Fan et al. (2002) was used to identify children who were truly adopted.
Previous Foster: Children adopted out of foster care (n=110).
Foster Children: Foster children who were never adopted (n=123).
Private Adoption: Adopted children who were never in foster care (n=206).
Biological Children: Children raised in a home with at least 1 biological parent (n=9,871). Used as reference category.
Privately adopted children tend to be in more advantaged homes, and foster children were in less advantaged homes.
Acknowledgement: This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website ( No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis