Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Adoption Study: Kety Et Al (1968)
- ABOUT
- AIM
- To find out if there is a genetic
basis for schizophrenia
- DESIGN
- independent groups design because it
looks at the difference between
biological drelatives and adoptive
relatives of schizophrenia-sufferers
- As adoption and
schizophrenia are
naturally-occurring
variables, this is a natural
experiment.
- DV
- The researcher's measured the
prevalence of
schizophrenia-related mental
illness among family members.
- SAMPLE
- 34 schizophrenic patients taken from the
Danish Adoption Register for Copenhagen
- 33 mentally-healthy
Controls were selected
from the Danish Adoption
Registry.
- PROCEDURE
- Kety used the Danish family
records to locate adoptive and
biological relatives of all the
participants.
- e tracked down 463 relatives
and used the mental health
register to assess their mental
status.
- A panel of 4 Danish psychiatrists
used the medical records to
diagnose the family members.
- Once the diagnoses had been made, the
identities were revealed and they were
assigned to adoptive family groups (IA and
CA) or to the biological family groups (IB or
CB).
- RESULTS
- The research found more signs of schizophrenic
spectrum disorders in the index participants' biological
family than their adoptive family
- They found more spectrum disorders in the
index participants' biological families than in the
Controls' biological families.
- CONCLUSION
- There seems to be a genetic component
to schizophrenia because schizophrenic
adoptees were more likely to have
schizophrenia in their biological family
than their adoptive family
- EVALUATION
- GENERALISABILITY
- This study has a fairly
large sample and covers a
range of ages
- RELIABILITY
- Very reliable procedure and they replicated it in 1975, 1978 and 1994
- APPLICATION
- For families with a
history of
schizophrenia and
people looking to
adopt a child.
- VALIDITY
- Kety's American-Danish Adoption
Studies tie in with earlier research
like Gottesman & Shields (1966)
- ETHICS
- The participants in this
study were not directly
approached: only their
data was analysed by the
researchers
- This could be done under Danish laws without needing consent from the participants.