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Abstract
From 1999-2016, 267,098 children were adopted internationally from China (Budiman & Lopez, 2017); almost one-third of these children were adopted to the United States. A primary tenet of China’s transnational adoption program was that no information about the child’s first family could be located; however, recent events have proven that narrative to be false. The phenomenon of adoptive parents conducting a search and in some cases locating birth family members are the primary reasons for studying the motivations and experiences of a largely unstudied group. Using a methodology based in narrative inquiry, this qualitative, exploratory study addressed the call for theoretical grounding in adoption research by examining the personal experiences of 12 adoptive parents by utilizing the bioecological theory of human development (Bronfenbrenner 1979, 1986, 2000, 2005) and shared fate theory (Kirk, 1964, 1984). Findings indicated no single factor served as motivation for the search. Parents searched to counter their own or their child’s distress or trauma about circumstances surrounding the adoption, to respond to their own or their child’s desire for information, or a combination of these and other concerns. Omnipresent throughout all system levels and narratives were the concepts of complexity and uncertainty. To help visualize the complex nature of the continuous boundary-crossing of transnational, transracial adoptive parents, models were created to visualize both Kirk and Bronfenbrenner’s theories in relation to this population of adoptive parents.
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