Lab Note #12

Reflection

I recently had to cancel a series of focus groups I planned to conduct as part of my new project, the Transnational/Transcultural Adoption Project. I had to cancel these because so many of the people who signed up turned out to be fake.

For some time now, online surveys have had to deal with bots and scammers. This seems to be related to the chance to win a gift card or receive an honorarium for filling out a survey. Responses from fake emails make it appear that the survey is getting a great response rate. Unfortunately many of these fake accounts are randomly filling in responses and it takes hours and hours of painstaking work to eliminate the fake responses from the real responses. Cleaning the data becomes super challenging. You may have taken some surveys and had to answer some questions that were not related to the topic – often these are inserted to help researchers determine if the responses are from a valid participant.

As a means to be transparent, I’ll share some of what happened to me with my planned focus groups. I had a link to a form that transnational adoptees would need to fill out providing some information including what country they were adopted from, what country they were adopted to, and their age at adoption (as some examples). I had to spend several days going through the form responses and I had hundreds of responses. I noted many responses that made me skeptical because of my knowledge of transnational adoption. For example, countries that were very uncommon as birth countries were included on the form. It is unusual, for example, for an adoptee to be born in Australia and adopted to Canada unless it was a relative adoption. I was surprised by how many responses indicated the adoptee was adopted as an adult. Adult adoption responses ranged from the late teens up through 30 years old. At first I thought it was my mistake for not clarifying that I was looking for participants adopted as children for the focus groups. I had to contact these accounts to verify they were adopted as adults. Some folks responded they were “typos” and others said they were adopted as adults.

The second stage of the process was to contact potential participants and have them fill out a consent form with some basic demographics, including again the country of birth/origin and year of adoption. I had included a question for the respondent to write their name so I could match them with the sign-up form. Out of more than 40 responses to the consent form, only two people provided names. I had one person email me to let me know the name question wasn’t working. As a result, I emailed people and asked them to provide their country of origin and the year they were adopted.

This is when I learned many of these respondents were false. Overwhelmingly people were providing me with birth countries and adoption dates that did not match the consent form. In many cases they also did not match the original participant sign-up form. When I say the information did not match, I mean wildly different – for example, saying in their sign-up form they were born in Russia and adopted to Germany in 2000 but then saying they were born in Nigeria and adopted to the US in 2016 on their email (and which I could not verify with the consent responses). For every adoptee I was able to verify and match, I had about five who I determined were fake. When I received a response that seemed fake, I asked why the countries and years were different on the sign-up form versus what they were giving me now (or different from the consent form). The responses I received were outright silly.

What complicated this process for me was that I understand adoptees can struggle with knowing all their information. For example, I myself can’t even verify when I was legally adopted – I know what date I arrived in the USA but as a Korean adoptee, I hadn’t been legally adopted when I arrived. My adoptive parents did not come to Korea and finalize my adoption there, as is customary for some countries (for example, Russian adoptees were finalized in Russia). Some of us also have falsified birth dates. It is inherently part of the transnational adoption experience to have incorrect or missing information. When I participate in adoption research I have a stock set of dates I use consistently. Was I actually 3 years old when I was adopted? Since I do not have reliable information my birth date is accurate, I can only say with some certainty how much time passed when I was in my two orphanages. But then, I can’t reliably respond when researchers ask me when I was adopted because I don’t actually know since my adoptive parents don’t remember. So, I use my arrival date but this means my responses on adoption research studies are not 100% accurate.

As someone sensitive to this reality, I wanted to believe those folks responding to the study were maybe slightly confused about their adoption dates. But when coupled with their completely different countries of origin, I knew these were false accounts. I understand the anonymous scammers and bots taking surveys for a chance to get a gift card but I was truly confused that anyone would sign up for a focus group. If I had not caught on that they were fake, would they have not shown up, hoping to get the gift card anyway? Or would have they participated and given false answers and violated the experience of every legitimate adoptee who was in the focus group?

I am taking some time to figure out what my next steps should be. I wanted to be broad in my inclusion of transnational adoptee voices, but I can now see that some of the things I’ve done to be more accessible (such as provide examples in my questions, be open to transnational adoptees outside the USA, to provide a gift card) increased the number of fake responses.

The goal of trying to make research available to a wider population of adoptees has meant many of us doing adoption research now deal with trying to eliminate fake responses. This has real consequences for adoptees – if we cannot verify the responses come from real adoptees then we cannot analyze the data. Research relies on ensuring the data are valid and reliable.

I’ve been talking a lot over the past decade about how hard it is to get valid and reliable data on adoptees. I’ve seen more researchers decline to publish a survey link in favor of making potential respondents email the research team for the link. I understand why this cautious method of recruitment happens, but the down side is it gives the appearance of trying to limit or minimize a diverse pool of respondents – trying to get certain types of adoptees to respond to skew or confirm data.

Fake scammers and bots are not only harming adoption research – all research that relies on large numbers of participants can and are subject to this – but for a population of folks that are already underrepresented in research, it’s especially painful.

Research

I wanted to pass on this call for adoptee participants for a study about adoptees and health care. I think this is an important topic and encourage everyone to participate. From the research flyer: the study aim is to assess the experiences of adopted individuals in the US healthcare system. They hope to understand the challenges faced by adoptee patients, and adoption-competent care by healthcare providers. One of the researchers is an adoptee. You can get more information at adoptionresearch@umassmed.edu or use the QR code in this image to participate.

Allyson D. Stevenson’s book Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship explores the history of the removal of Indigenous, First Nations, and Metis children in Canada (a similar practice happened in the United States, leading to the creation and passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act, currently being challenged in the Supreme Court). I think it’s important to know that similar practices of forced removal of indigenous children happened in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. I’ve mentioned it before but it’s worth sharing again the books written by Dr. Margaret Jacobs who has extensively researched indigenous child removal. Her book, White Mother to a Dark Race is excellent, and she also wrote A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World.

In case you missed it, I spoke about the challenges of researching adoption in an interview with Mike Davis at KUOW. The interview aimed to understand the context of a play, Wolf Play, by Hansol Jung, in which a Korean adoptee takes on the alternate persona of a wolf as he navigates being re-homed by his first adoptive parents. In the interview, I discuss re-homing and how difficult it is to really understand how and why adoptions break down. Angela Tucker speaks on the challenges of transracial adoption.

I really appreciated the thoughtfulness of the journalist and producer. They questioned the deeply problematic aspects of adoption that are often taken for granted as necessary – and why adoptees themselves are not centered more often.

Resources

I recently learned about the Adoptee Resource Database, created by Mei Tomko, a Chinese adoptee.

Recommendations

An article profiling Dawn Tomlinson, a Korean adoptee. I had the pleasure of meeting Dawn back when I lived in MN but I didn’t realize she was a bojagi artist. Over my sabbatical I have been learning about bojagi and as a sewing and knitting enthusiast, I’d purchased a book (though I haven’t yet tried any of the projects). This feature of Dawn inspired me to get back to this form of traditional Korean sewing. See the article, How ‘bojagi’ helped adoptee reconnect with Korean roots – from Korea Times

I wanted to also share a couple of documentaries examining transnational adoption in other countries.

First, a documentary about Haitian French adoptees. I hope it is available with English translation in the future.

Next, this documentary is about a Sri Lankan adoptee adopted to Norway.