Adoptive identity and adjustment from adolescence to emerging adulthood: A person-centered approach.

Adopted persons face special challenges in the development of identity, as aspects of their histories may be unknown, making it difficult to construct a coherent narrative linking past, present, and future. Extensive literature on adjustment outcomes for adopted persons indicates an elevated risk for adjustment problems. In this study, a low-risk sample of adopted youth is involved to examine, longitudinally, connections between adoptive identity and adjustment.

Openness to experience and creativity: When does global citizenship matter?

The relationship between the openness to experience trait (OTE) and creativity has been well documented in previous research. Likewise, the global citizenship construct has theoretical overlap with both OTE and creativity. We hypothesised global citizenship would make a unique contribution to explaining variance in five types of creativity (self/everyday, scholarly, performance, mechanical/scientific and artistic), above and beyond the contribution of OTE.

Processes linked to contact changes in adoptive kinship networks.

The purpose of this study was to reveal underlying processes in adoptive kinship networks that experienced increases or decreases in levels of openness during the child's adolescent years. Intensive case study analyses were conducted for 8 adoptive kinship networks (each including an adoptive mother, adoptive father, adopted adolescent, and birth mother), half of whom had experienced an increase in openness from indirect (mediated) to direct (fully disclosed) contact and half of whom had ceased indirect contact between Waves 1 and 2 of a longitudinal study. Adoptive mothers tended to be more involved in contact with the birth mother than were adoptive fathers or adopted adolescents.

Connecting national survey data with DSM-IV criteria.

Purpose: To show how connections can be made among items in a nationally representative survey of adolescents and criteria for "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition" (DSM-IV) diagnoses.

Methods: Data for this study came from the Wave I in-home interview of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a nationwide study of approximately 90,000 adolescents and their parents. Proxy variables were developed for four DSM-IV diagnoses based on Wave I survey questions: conduct disorder, alcohol abuse, cannabis abuse, and major depressive disorder (single episode).