b) this article talks about the differences in foster care compared to those that need it not. it talks about the different effects that the foster parents can have on the children as well as the possible behavioral effects that the children can show. it talks about how certain parents are more apt than others to be foster parents, and how it usually ends up being the people that were themselves in foster care that tended to be the better parents.
c) this article seems to be organized in a chronological order. it starts by talking about foster family's then moving onto topics such as parenting, family functioning, marital functioning, temperment, parent mental health and finally social support. in the very beginning it has an introduction and at the end it has a conclusion that sums up what the authors just finished talking about.
d) the purpose of this review is to correct any misconceptions about foster families. it shows pros and cons to the idea and is mainly to inform its readers about studies they have either done or have found on foster families.
e) the only violation of critical thinking in this article that i can tell is that it does not consider interpretations nor does it tolerate uncertainty.
Hi Kevin,
ReplyDeleteWhat I thought made this article successful was that for each topic that the researchers addressed (Parenting, Home Environment, Marital Functioning, etc), they provided two different summaries--comparison of foster families to biological families (aka "General Population") and data that is specific to foster families.
I also liked how the article addressed the need for future research on the relationships between foster children and their adoptive mothers.
A potential weakness in the article was that no attention was paid to different types of families, whether biological or foster families. In fact, no mention was made of single parents, senior citizens, or LGBT couples as foster families. The researchers mentioned that, in the majority of studies that they found, no attention at all was paid to foster fathers. It seems that previous researchers have made a lot of assumptions about foster families and did not think outside the box in regard to who else could be raising children.
R. Wexelbaum