Trajectories of psychosocial functioning and attachment behaviors among children adopted in the Ontario child welfare system
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The adoption of children involved in the child welfare system is viewed as a favorable outcome when family reconstitution is impossible, partially due to the relationship security afforded by long-term placement permanence. Recognition of the importance of secure caregiver-child relationships has informed the development of caregiving-oriented attachment-focused services, such as those provided by the Therapeutic Family Care Program (TFCP). The present study examines the trajectories of adopted children (n = 71) between 3.33 and 13.70 years of age at first assessment (M = 7.65, SD = 2.53) involved with TFCP. Children were assessed by their caregivers on a semiannual basis using the Assessment Checklist for Children (ACC) and the ACC+, with children receiving up to 9 assessments (n = 201, M = 2.57, SD = 1.83). We conducted growth curve analyses for children’s total clinical scores, self-esteem, adaptive functioning, and attachment-specific clinical domains. Results suggest that children start with clinically significant psychopathology, with older children and females having more psychosocial and attachment-related difficulties initially. Males’ psychosocial functioning was stable over time, whereas females improved significantly in all domains. We discuss implications for mental health services within child welfare and future directions for research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".