The grant's recipients are Gerald Mahoney, the Verna Houck Motto Professor of Child and Family Services; and Victor Groza, professor and chair of the Mandel School's doctoral program.
"There is a lot of evidence to show that even though adopted children are at risk for emotional and developmental problems, they are less likely to be identified as having these problems than other children and are thus not referred often for early intervention services," said Mahoney, the principal investigator.
Mahoney explained that the funding will be used to develop a "Prevention, Assessment, Referral and Transition" model that parents of adopted children and case workers with adoption agencies can use to prevent developmental problems among young adopted children and to refer children with serious developmental problems to early intervention or special education services.
The model will be tested using 80 adopted children and their parents, divided into two groups. One group will receive intervention services for six months and the other for 12. In the first year intervention will be carried out with individual families.
"We have data to indicate that this model should work in weekly interventions with individual families over a twelve period of time" Mahoney said. "Our project will try to find out if less frequent or less labor-intensive interventions will also work. Weekly visits to a family by an adoption case worker are not feasible over the course of a year. So we need to see if positive developmental outcomes can be achieved in less time."
The grant is from the Office of Special Education Programs in the U.S. Department of Education.
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