Waiting Children, Forever Families: A Transitivity and Thematic Analysis of Adoption Agency Blog Posts

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Historically, adoption agencies portrayed international adoption as the salvation of orphans. Our taxonomic and transitivity analysis examines how bloggers on one US-based adoption agency's blog represented adopted persons, adoptive families, birth families, and adoption agencies. Among the seventy-nine international adoption posts examined, bloggers most frequently presented adoptive families and the adoption agency as the social actors engaged in high transitivity verb processes. Verb transitivity conveys a social actor's ability to affect others or situations. Thematic analysis in this essay uncovers how adoptive parents are portrayed as powerful and loving, the adoption agency as a benevolent advocate, and adopted persons as children "waiting" and "in need." Birth families were rarely the grammatical subject of sentences and were largely erased from bloggers' adoption narratives. This analysis uncovered how adoptive parents, not adopted persons, were the focus of these adoption narratives, highlighting the need for more nuanced and adopted-person-centered understandings of adoption in such forums.