Critique of a “Real-World” Evaluation of an Adoptive Parenting Programme by Alan Rushton and Elizabeth Monck

This paper makes an attempt to give a reasonable critique of a peer-reviewed journal article. The article chosen for this purpose is the research dedicated to solving the problems which result from the process of adoption, to be more precise – to evaluation of an adoptive parenting programme. After criticizing each structural unit of the article, the overall evaluation is given. Keywords: critique, evaluation of an adoptive parenting programme,Critique of a “Real-World” Evaluation of an Adoptive Parenting Programme by Alan Rushton and Elizabeth MonckThe article by Alan Rushton and Elizabeth Monck (Rushton & Monck, 2010) focuses on evaluation of a new approach to managing problems connected with adoption of children and placing them to new homes. The authors call this approach “adoptive parenting programme”. Proceeding from a wide range of studies which give conclusive evidence that the extent of the child’s psycho-social problems is related to instability of the placement, the researchers made a presumption that the awareness of possible problems might help to avoid destabilization of the environment. For this purpose they tried to apply the parenting programme which was used to help parents to manage their problematic children to adopters and tackling problems of adopted children. The given article is the evaluation of that trial.Although on the whole the review of literature is rather full and correctly cited, there are some considerable drawbacks. First of all, the information given is not enough to understand what the authors wanted to emphasize on. For example, the “two contrasting parenting programmes” are mentioned. However, the difference between these two programmes is not explained, while it is crucial for the reader’s understanding of the research, because one programme is supposed to be more efficient. Hence, it can be said that the logic of the literature review is broken, which results in difficulties with understanding the research questions and linking it to the literature reviewed. If we compare this article with an article on the similar topic (Brand & Brinich, 1999), we will see that the latter has a more detailed literature review, which takes into account and explains all the possible approaches to the problem, even those which contradict the position of the researchers. Even more problems can be found when concerning the methodological section of the article. Even though the detailed description of the participants of the study and the way how they were chosen is given, there is some criticism about the method itself. Firstly, the procedures were described in quite an unclear way, so that it will be hard to repeat the same study. Secondly, the authorities were chosen not randomly, but due to the number of children adopted during the past 3 years. Such an approach distorts the results, because it contradicts the principles of validity and reliability of the data, limiting the generalizability. This sample is not representative to the parent population, unlike the sample made for the research of behavior problems of adopted children in Minnesota …