Interviews

The interviews with adoptive parents and adopted young people aimed to explore the qualitative meanings attached to the experiences of openness in adoptive families today. The majority of interviews were carried out via the telephone (23 out of 29) after participants were given a choice of this method or meeting face-to-face. The semi- structured interviews lasted approximately 1-1.5 hours for parents and approximately 30- 45 minutes for adoptees. The usual method of data collection suited to IPA is the semi- structured interview (Smith & Osborn, 2003). The semi-structured interviews allowed for a focus on the research questions but also for flexibility to allow stories to emerge with new perspectives on the phenomenon. The interview schedule included broad questions allowing the participant to direct the course of the interview and to avoid the imposition of the researcher’s understanding or framing of the topic on participant accounts (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009). This flexibility allows the interviewer to change the questions, or the order of them, in light of participant responses and to probe interesting areas which arise (Smith & Osborn, 2003). The interview schedule focussed on the following areas: adoptive family background, communicative openness, post-adoption contact experiences, family use of communicative technologies, opinion or experience of virtual contact, and

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thoughts about future contact and support needs (see Appendix D and E). The main questions were deliberately broad to allow flexibility, and prompt questions were used if participants needed clarification. By creating an interview schedule in advance it is possible to think about the areas the interview will cover and to plan for any difficulties and sensitivities that may arise (Smith & Osborn, 2003). However, the interviewer should intervene as little as possible to allow participant accounts to be as close to their thoughts about the topic area as possible (Smith & Osborn, 2003).

The original design planned to recruit interview participants from the online survey alone. As you can see from the survey (see Appendix A), participants were asked if they would be willing to take part in an interview following completion of the survey. I specifically asked for participants who had children aged 11-18 years who had experienced virtual contact to consider taking part in an interview. It was then hoped that I would be able to sample 10 adoptive families to interview including adoptive parents and adoptees, and to recruit birth relatives connected to each adoptive family through the adoptive parents. This would have resulted in interviews with ten adoptive triangles featuring perspectives from each member of the triad. However, in practice this sampling technique did not yield the sample originally intended. This was due to the fact that a number of parents (n=10) expressed an interest in the interview even if they hadn’t experienced virtual contact. I therefore felt an ethical responsibility to facilitate these interviews to give participants the opportunity to be heard. This in fact gathered in depth data regarding the use of traditional methods of openness and uncovered adoptive parent concerns and fears regarding virtual contact. This added a valuable element to the data analysis as it allowed for different perspectives and experiences to emerge and to compare opinion of virtual contact to the reality of its occurrence. There were only a small number of adoptive parents who had experienced virtual contact who decided to take part in an interview following completion of the survey (n=3). This may have been due to the fact that the adoptive parents who had experienced virtual contact were still dealing with ‘live issues’. Therefore, an additional sampling technique was employed to increase the numbers of interviewees who had experienced virtual contact. The host adoption agency, Scottish Adoption, contacted a number of their adoptive parents (n=8) who were known to have experienced virtual contact to take part in an interview. However, an issue of sampling bias must be noted as the participants who were recruited via the adoption agency were known to practitioners due to them reporting the virtual contact in their family and asking for support. Therefore their accounts may not be representative of wider families and may represent a more

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negative picture of virtual contact. I also found it impossible to recruit birth relatives in this sample. As even in cases where virtual contact was working well, adoptive parents were reluctant to contact birth relatives to inform them of the study in order to not ‘rock the boat’. Therefore, the absence of birth relative perspectives should be considered in this study and the lack of opportunity for their voice to be heard in this instance. This is also true for adopted young people, as most adoptive parents refused to allow their child to take part in the study either. As noted earlier, the live issues that the families were dealing with were often deemed too sensitive to allow further research intrusion. Despite the lack of birth relative perspectives, the inclusion of adoptive parent and adoptee voices can uncover important meanings regarding the practice of openness in adoptive families. As MacDonald and McSherry (2011: 13) argue “the welfare of the adopted child is inextricably linked with the welfare of their adoptive parents, it is useful to understand the impact of openness on adopters”. Therefore the relationship between adopters and their children and a comparison of their accounts can provide a valuable understanding of openness in adoption today.

Despite the sampling challenges, I was able to recruit a suitable sample to fulfil and Thematic and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Brocki and Wearden (2006) state that sample sizes in IPA studies range from one to thirty. 29 people were interviewed in total, including 23 adoptive parents and 6 adopted young people. Mothers represented the majority of adoptive parents in the interviews, despite me not aiming to recruit more mothers than fathers. This sampling issue was also found by Howe (1996: 7) who stated that even in the minority of cases where the adoptive father was also interviewed, the adoptive mother “was the major informant”. The total number of interviewees has been separated into two categories to differentiate those who have and have not experienced virtual contact. This differentiation will appear throughout the analysis:

 No Virtual contact group (No VC group): 10 adoptive mothers who had not reported the experience of virtual contact in their family. All adopters from this group were recruited from the survey and therefore have complete data, in the sense of quantitative and qualitative accounts.

 Virtual contact group (VC group): 11 cases in which virtual contact had occurred in their family and includes 13 adoptive parents (10 adoptive mothers and 3 adoptive fathers, with two couples interviewed together) and 6 adoptees from 4 of the 11 families (3 siblings, 4 boys and 2 girls, aged 14-22 years). Two of the adoptees

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interviewed are 18 years or above which makes them adult respondents (see Appendix F, family 13). However, they had experienced virtual contact within the same family context as their 16 year old sibling and I therefore thought it was important to keep their views. Due to the small number of virtual contact respondents in the survey (and the fact that not all of them wanted to participate in an interview) recruitment of VC participants moved beyond the survey to ensure a comparable sample to No VC parents. The recruitment of the 11 cases is outlined below:

o 3 from the survey

o 8 cases directed by adoption agency or by an adoptive parent announcement on an online forum