Adoptees' Ethnic Identity Within Family and Social Contexts

New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, Number 150

This special issue addresses the construction of ethnic identity among international transracial adoptees, which typically involve the placement of Black, Asian, Hispanic, or Multiracial children with White parents. International transracial adoptees, similar to immigrants, navigate a cultural and ethnic context other than their birth culture. However, they are unique in that they navigate these experiences within families who don’t share their cultural, ethnic, and racial background. Critical questions emerge about the construction and development of their ethnic identity. These questions include

• the role that transracial adoptive parents play in providing cultural socialization (exposure to children’s birth culture);
• the impact of culture camps designed to provide cultural socialization in the context of peers;
• the intersection of adoptive identity and ethnic identity and youth adjustment;
• whether relations between ethnic identity and adjustment are linear or curvilinear;
• the role of bicultural identity integration as a link between ethnic identity and pscyhosocial adjustment; and
• ethnic identity processes among internationally transracially adopted young adults who mentor younger adoptees from similar cultures.

These questions are addressed in this special issue in a collection of studies that examine ethnic identity among diverse international transracial adoptees, at different ages, adopted into two countries and using differing sample sizes and methodologies.

International transracial adoptive families represent a microcosm of the growing international, transracial, and transethnic social transactions taking place in this diverse world. The collective findings in this special issue about the multidimensionality of ethnic identity and its intersectionality with other identities across developmental eras not only enhance knowledge about identity development among international transracial adoptees, but also expand understanding about identity development in general.

This is the 150th volume in this Jossey-Bass series New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development. Its mission is to provide scientific and scholarly presentations on cutting edge issues and concepts in this subject area. Each volume focuses on a specific new direction or research topic and is edited by experts from that field.