Talk:Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study

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Should the article not mention the critical analysis on the weakness of the study itself included in the study Family Racial Socialization and Ecological Comptence: Longitudinal Assessments of African-American Transracial Adoptees by Kimberly M. DeBerry, Sandra Scarr and Richard Weinberg (Child Development Vol. 67, No. 5 (Oct., 1996), pp. 2375-2399)? Fad (ix) 17:13, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

If you can present the facts and arguments the criticism is based on that'd be a nice addition. It looks like a certain group of researchers can't make up their minds between claiming the results support an environmental explanation and discrediting the entire thing. --Scandum 09:19, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
The study is more of a continuation of the previous one, it contains models of stressors and then, adjustments. The Wiki article BTW, does not contain the previous IQ(those before age 7), the Black group had about 110. Also, Scarr does not really reject genetic reasons for intelligence, to the contrary. In her 1991 presidential address to the Society for Research in Child Developpement, she declared: "parental genes determine his or her phenotypes, the child's genes determine his or her phenotype, and the child's environment is merely a reflection of the characteristics of both parents and child." (Scarr, 1992, p. 9) Scarr has also written a five pages praises of Jensen, in a way that probably even Rushton or others in the same "camp" haven't done so. (See: On Arthur Jensen's integrity published in the Intelligence, Volume 26, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 227-232)
While Scarr was examplary, the other camp has attached her intentions and attributed reasons for the reasons why it took so long before publishing the conclusions. For now, I don't have really the time to contribute, but if you are interested, I can send you the study (Family Racial Socialization and Ecological Comptence: Longitudinal Assessments of African-American Transracial Adoptees) in question. Fad (ix) 23:14, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] effect of racism

Has any researcher observed the effect that societal racism might have in the child's advancement? The caste-like minority argument seems relevant here.--Urthogie 17:25, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] no data on race of adopting parents

Were Black children adopted more often by Black foster parents than White children were? Pablo2garcia 12:47, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Read the first sentence of the article. "..adopted by advantaged white families". All of the parents in the study were white.

[edit] Doesn't list methdological flaws

This article lists very few. if really any, of the methodological flaws contained in the Transracial study. It fails to mention that the IQ's of the adopted parents wern't tested, the children's IQ's before even being put into the adopted home wern't tested (which is why there was so much confusion about the slightly higher IQ over the black average, yet being the same as the Minnesota average), the fact that a number of the children left the program, especially the white sample, along with the children being adopted at age 7, which is halfway through childhood, making it impossible to truly assess environmental effects, due to how a person's brain becomes more developed as they age, thus lowering environmental effects on IQ (IE gains in IQ would result in brain growth), and how the black children were adopted even later. Plus, they didn't even examine all of the adoptees at age 17! And these were only AVERAGES.

This study is just pure trash.

These methodological "flaws" didn't seem to be to troubling to the researchers when, at age seven, the IQ gap seemed to be much smaller and blacks had a higher IQ than the U.S. mean. Are we to believe that things like the relatively late adoption of the black kids didn't prevent them from scoring well at age seven but DID prevent them from scoring well at age 17? Surely a genetic contribution can follow this pattern given that many genes don't "kick in" until puberty but are we to believe that late adoption doesn't as well? I think what we have here was a very disappointing follow up study that egalitarians had to scramble to explain.

What are you even talking about? IQ can flucuate largely at any age, but this says absolutely nothing as to how many permanent gains can be made. BTW, the study was looking at the effects of parental environment on IQ, which, with the exception of the highly stimulating environments typically provided by east asian and white parents, has little effect on IQ.

I wrote these critiques at the early of the year, and I appear to be wrong on some of them. Nearly all of the low IQ whites did drop out, but I'm still unsure of the full dynamics of the study.

Either way, the study is very faulty- no, it's essentially a strawman when you consider the parental environment variable.

[edit] age and iq scores

I remember eading that the black children were adopted later and later adoption age lowers iq. YVNP (talk) 05:21, 11 April 2008 (UTC)