Ethical Considerations in Adoption Research: Navigating Confidentiality and Privacy Across the Adoption Kinship Network

Adoption research often includes multiple members of the adoption network, each of whom has distinctive perspectives. Participants may include adopted individuals and their siblings as well as adoptive parents, birth parents, and adoption professionals. Due to these multiple informants and the sensitivity of the topics explored in adoption research, researchers encounter several unique ethical concerns when working with populations impacted by adoption. The current paper addresses confidentiality and privacy issues that arise when conducting adoption research. Examples from a longitudinal study on openness in adoption are provided to highlight strategies that can be used to address these issues.

The emergence of team science: Understanding the state of adoption research through social network analysis

The notion of team science has recently gained popularity in European and American health sciences considering increasing evidence that scientific collaboration produces higher-impact research and that complex scientific problems are better investigated by interdisciplinary teams. While publication metrics indicate adoption research is expanding, the comprehensive structure of adoption studies as a scientific field has not been formally evaluated for collaborative and cross-disciplinary activity. This article aims to elucidate the structure, composition, and dynamics of scientific relationships within adoption research that may inform research and practice strategies, competencies, and cohesion within the field. Using social network analysis, we extracted bibliographic data on 2767 peer-reviewed adoption-related articles from 1930s to 2014 and evaluated the resulting co-authorship and co-citation networks. We found that adoption research has grown substantially over the last 25 years, and is conducted in varied disciplines, with increasing collaboration across geography and disciplinary areas. The co-authorship and co-citation networks are approaching numeric thresholds and structural configurations distinctive of well-established and more institutionalized fields of study. These findings reveal the maturation of adoption studies as a team science and argue for the development of institutional mechanisms that support such evolution. Implications for professional and research planning are discussed.