Beyond the Childhood Years: Openness in Adoptive Kinship Networks

Communicative openness within adoptive families: adoptive parents’ narrative accounts of the challenges of adoption talk and the approaches used to manage these challenges. Communicative openness within adoptive families: adoptive parents’ narrative accounts of the challenges of adoption

Policy and practice relating to openness in adoption has changed substantially in the last 30 years. There is a growing body of empirical research which supports both structural and communicative openness and there is widespread consensus that communicative openness is desirable within adoptive families. Despite this, there is evidence that some adoptive parents and their adopted children strug...

Introduction: Kinship Networks and Cohesion

Bridging the divide: openness in adoption and postadoption psychosocial adjustment among birth and adoptive parents.

Using 323 matched parties of birth mothers and adoptive parents, this study examined the association between the degree of adoption openness (e.g., contact and knowledge between parties) and birth and adoptive parents' postadoption adjustment shortly after the adoption placement (6 to 9 months). Data from birth fathers (N = 112), an understudied sample, were also explored. Openness was assessed...

Kinship Verification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Kinship verification from facial images is an interesting and challenging problem. The current algorithms on this topic typically represent faces with multiple low-level features, followed by a shallow learning model. However, these general manual features cannot well discover information implied in facial images for kinship verification, and thus even current best algorithms are not satisfying...

Homophyly/Kinship Model: Naturally Evolving Networks

It has been a challenge to understand the formation and roles of social groups or natural communities in the evolution of species, societies and real world networks. Here, we propose the hypothesis that homophyly/kinship is the intrinsic mechanism of natural communities, introduce the notion of the affinity exponent and propose the homophyly/kinship model of networks. We demonstrate that the ne...