In the summer on 2021 Zoe Poolos ’22 worked with Associate Professor Liz Raleigh on the Dear Birthmother project. Zoe shared her experience as an SRP with the Humanities Center
“The Dear Birthmother project explored how transracial adoption was affected by COVID-19, and how prospective parents looking to adopt children discussed race in their profiles. I used the website Adoptimist, where these profiles were stored, to analyze and categorize the content of the profiles. I looked at the “main” letter from the prospective parents to the birthmother, the “family facts” section, and the “about us” section, all of which helped to show the reader an idea of family values, characteristics, and preferences. Through this analysis, I found that it is very rare for families to talk about race in their profiles — many only choose to do so by stating a “heritage preference” for the baby, which was also interesting to analyze as many families were White and some had very specific preferences for the race of their child that were not always just white.
One of the most interesting experiences I had was learning more about the adoption industry through specific books and other readings given to me by my faculty sponsor, which also included her own published book. It provided ground for a lot of interesting and deep discussion as well as gave me further context for the reasons why people might choose to adopt or why the adoption process can be as complex as it is.
Through this project, I improved my skills in qualitative content analysis and organization, as well as data collection and file organization. I really enjoyed working with Liz, my faculty sponsor. We always had really enjoyable and thought-provoking conversations over Zoom, as I was doing research remotely. She always made sure to check in about my progress and was able to find lots of outside resources for me to read that would give me much more context for the reasons behind her interest in transracial adoption and the construction of her research questions.”