Setting the Agenda: A Family Communication Research Agenda for Examining Birth Family Search and Reunion in the Transnational Adoption Context

Abstract

ABSTRACT Family communication scholarship on transnational adoption has privileged adoptive family communication, in part, because only a fraction of transnational adoptees have been able to locate birth relatives. Given increased global access to DNA testing and more advanced technologies, reunions between transnational adoptees and birth families are increasing. Informed by our positionalities as an adoptive mother of a child born in China and a Korean adult adoptee in reunion with her birth family, we set an agenda for family communication research in the context of transnational adoption birth family search and reunion. We raise three questions for consideration in future family communication research on this topic: (a) Whose history is this?, (b) Whose search is this?, and (c) Whose culture is this? This agenda privileges theories and constructs promising for answering these questions, including communication privacy management theory, family communication patterns theory, adoptive identity, ambiguous loss, and culture and communication.