Bibliographic record
Abstract
This serves as an update and extension of “The Meaning of the Search,” a chapter co-authored by the late Marshall D. Schechter and the author more than a generation ago. Adopted adults’ searches for their birth families were then well underway despite the laws prohibiting access to the adoption record. From results of a detailed questionnaire survey of a large number of adopted adults recruited from search organizations, the authors extracted and discussed the internal meanings of the subjects’ statements explaining their need to search. In the intervening time, activated searches and reunions have become even more common, as reflected in the more recent literature. However, versions of “sealed record” laws still pertain in three-quarters of the American states and in parts of Canada, Western Europe, and other countries, including those with “semi-open” adoptions. They have in common the contention that the alleged “rights” of the four parents to “full confidentiality” outweigh the adopted person’s stated medical and psychological needs. With many systemic problems as the backdrop, this chapter acquaints therapists with the identified psychological issues underlying the search, either for information or for meeting birth relatives, cites the literature of clinical relevance, and suggests some best practices should search issues come up in therapy. Qualification : Interspersed throughout the chapter are verbatim quotes from adopted individuals derived from multiple sources over many years, primarily from questionnaires distributed by mail or at conferences attended by adopted people, or from private communications.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.030 | 0.092 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.055 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.003 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".