X. Conclusions: overview of findings from the era study, inferences, and research implications

In this monograph, we have brought the findings of the English and Romanian Adoptee (ERA) study up to age 15 years and, in so doing, have focused especially on the question of whether there are deprivation-specific psychological patterns (DSPs) that differ meaningfully from other forms of psychopathology. For this purpose, our main analytic strategy was to compare the subgroup of young people who had received institutional care in Romania that persisted up to at least the age of 6 months and a pooled comparison group that comprised the remainder of the sample. In chapter II, we presented the evidence that there were no significant variations among the three subgroups that made up the pooled comparison group. A large proportion of this pooled comparison group came from the 52 individuals adopted before the age of 6 months from within the United Kingdom, who had not experienced institutional care or other major deprivation experiences. In addition, there were 45 children who had experienced institutional care that had ceased before the age of 6 months. Finally, there was a small group of 21 Romanian individuals who had come from a severely deprived background but who had not experienced institutional care. In the young people who experienced institutional deprivation, we found that a cut-off at 6 months marked the division between those without appreciable sequelae and those with a substantial proportion of persisting deficits. Because we found that the rate of deficits in the group who had experienced institutional care for 46 months did not vary according to the duration of institutional care, we pooled the entire group of individuals experiencing institutional care up to at least the age of 6 months. We found that these two pooled groups differed substantially and significantly in the rate of maladaptive outcomes. The details of the evidence justifying this pooling and a two-way comparison are provided in chapter II. Because of our interest in exploring the possibility of DSPs, our main subdivision within the above 6-month group was between those individuals showing the putative DSPs and those showing other forms of psychopathology or not showing deficits at all.