During the next stage of the CAP, a novel assessment was developed to conduct tests over the phone with both parents and the children at ages 9, 10, and 11. Then in 1983, we began testing children in the laboratory after they had completed first grade. Follow-up phone calls to the parents kept the investigators in touch with the families at ages five and six. The first assessments of the children were begun in 1977 when the oldest CAP probands were one-year olds.Īnnual home visits were scheduled for all CAP probands and their younger siblings through age four. A control group was recruited through area hospitals and matched on the basis of family demographics. The willing adoptive parents then completed the same measures as the birth parents. In order to avoid influencing the adoption process, adoptive parents were approached by the agency social workers after the adoption was complete. These parents completed a three-hour battery of psychological measures, many of which were based on an earlier large-scale study of parents and children, the Hawaii Family Study of Cognition. In 1976, CAP staff began recruiting birth mothers (and fathers if possible) through Denver Catholic and Lutheran Social Services, the two largest adoption agencies in the Rocky Mountain region. Grant Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Mental Health, Child Health and Human Development, and Drug Abuse.
During the ensuing 25 years the Colorado Adoption Project (CAP) has been supported by multiple grants from the William T. Fortunately, the director of one of Denver's agencies was enthusiastic about participating in the study and the University of Colorado provided some initial financial support.
At the time, they thought a prospective adoption study of normal development could resolve many questions about the relative roles of cultural and biological influence, but were uncertain about cooperation from adoption agencies and the likelihood of funding. However, John Defries and Robert Plomin probably did not imagine that a quarter century later they would be presiding over an ongoing study which has enrolled more than 2,400 individuals, tracking the development of children from infancy to adulthood. History of the Colorado Adoption Project Twenty five years ago two young professors at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics began a longitudinal adoption study in Colorado.
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