Adopted Children’s and Parents’ Experiences of Life Storybooks

Introduction
The research into children’s and adopters’ views and experiences of their life storybooks was funded as part of the ‘Post-Adoption Support Pilot’ delivered by Coram and supported by the Hadley Centre. The pilot aimed to increase the number of parents benefitting from post-adoption parenting programmes and the number of children who have access to the creative therapies such as art or music therapy. 

Within this stream of work, the Hadley Centre worked with Coram researchers to undertake a research project with adopted children and young people and their parents about life storybooks. This is a hugely under researched area of practice and there is a lack of empirical understanding about how life storybooks are experienced by children and families: a gap widely acknowledged in the academic literature.

Overall aim
To better understand how adopted children and their adoptive families experience, appraise and use life storybooks.

The project so far
Data has been collected with:

• 40 adoptive parents either through focus groups or individual telephone interviews
• 187 adoptive parents through an online survey
• 20 adopted children and young people through semi-structured individual interviews
• 10 Local Authority social work teams through telephone interviews
Next steps
Dissemination of the findings has occurred in a number of ways and DfE have provided some funding for ongoing work particularly related to the provision of training workshops for adoptive parents and social workers in the preparation and use of life storybooks.

Further writing and dissemination is planned. The Hadley Centre continue to support this work through advisory board membership and consultancy.
Funder: DfE funding to Coram as part of the PASS (Post-Adoption Support Pilot) project