ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how the sensitive nature of studying adoption in Hong Kong calls forth the need to reach informants through an ethnographic design. It presents the procedures in analyzing adoption case files to construct the adoption profile in Hong Kong. The chapter outlines how a scale pertaining to the stresses and coping of adoptive parents in Hong Kong is constructed basing on the structured questionnaire. The study of document and archival data has always been an important component of ethnographic research. The chapter examines a wide range of theories and issues, including permanency planning in child welfare, infertility, opening versus closing adoption records, parenting, adoptive parenting, stresses and coping, and so on. It explains the construction of scales in the structured questionnaire to measure the types of stresses experienced by adoptive parents and the factors which influenced their ability to cope with adoption.
