Proceedings XVII NATIONAL CONGRESS ITALIAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION CLINICAL AND DYNAMIC SECTION MILAZZO, MESSINA - SEPTEMBER 25-27 2015 Abstracts

Introduction National and international literature shows many studies and reflections about different aspects of adoption, especially focused on parents-child attachment relationship, as well as on children’s psychosocial adjustment. Current research directions in Psycho-Juridical work’s efficacy regarding adoption process and its outcomes are limited. Particularly, the adoption matching process evolves and develops over time, as strongly influenced not only by the characteristics of everyone involved (adoptive couple and child) as well as by the professionals’ actions that operators do before, during and after the adoption process. Objectives Our main objective is to examine the progress of national adoptions through a follow-up aimed at identifying risk and protective factors regard adoption process, the family members’ perceptions about family relationships and relationships with external words in terms of sense of belonging and psychosocial adjustment. Secondary, we intend to identify good practice in recruiting and assessing the suitability of new adoptive parents to prevent the risk of adoption failure. Methodology Participants: 50 adoptive families; 25 of them have adopted a child under the age of five years and the others 25 have adopted a child over the age of ten years. Measures: A semi-structured interview about adoptive experience (Greco, 1999; version for parents and version for children); a graphic-symbolic measure “La doppia luna” (Greco, 1999); a questionnaire about different aspects of adoption (Rosnati e Ferrari, 2010, version for wife and version for husband). Conclusions According to literature, our main results concern the lack of support to these families after the adoption and above all during adolescence as a particularly complex period characterised by instability and uncertainty.