The birth mother and the evolution of adoption policy and practice in England since 1926
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This PhD is an empirical investigation of how the evolution of adoption agency policy and practice in the twentieth century has impacted upon birth mothers’ motives for relinquishment, and their experiences of adoption. It examines how birth mothers have reached decisions about the adoption of their children, their role in the adoption process and how these answers have varied historically. Further, it attempts to understand the relationship between birth mothers’ experiences and wider moral, social and policy environments and how adoption agencies have mediated that relationship. Attitudes towards initiating and maintaining contact are also examined. Understanding changes in birth mothers’ options, motives and experiences of adoption have important implications for the adoption support services offered by adoption agencies. This thesis used a mixed methods approach, combining documentary analysis, with interviews and focus groups. This PhD draws upon archival materials collated from adoption case files, adoption panel meeting minutes (APMM), annual reports and other official documentation. It also utilizes evidence collated interviews carried out with six former Family Care personnel and professionals from six other adoption agencies, along with two focus groups carried out with the seven members of Family Care’s current adoption team. Historical research was fundamental to the methodological approach utilised in this PhD in order to uncover changes in birth mothers’ motives and experiences of adoption.
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 | 0.008 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".