About Us
Adopters Advocacy aims to highlight the voices and needs of adopters during the adoption process and after a child has been placed, without diminishing the importance of adoptees and their birth families.
We are a small research group consisting of senior and early career academics, and existing and future medical and clinical psychology practitioners.
Our research broadly focuses on adopters’ mental health and their support needs, with the ambition of bringing the voices of adopters who are seldom and rarely heard into the fore.
We work with adopters and prospective adopters to identify aspects of the adoption experience that can be considered taboo or attract stigma and other negative emotions. We adopt a creative approach when undertaking research to enable adopters to talk about the ‘hard stuff’ – the things that are hard to hear and hard to say.
Through research, we aim to bring about positive and evidence-based change to adoption policy and practice that is beneficial for all involved.