ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the significance of factors which affected the developmental pathways and patterns which shaped people's lives. It also examines further evidence from the literature about important influences during people's lives which may increase our understanding of the significance of gaining information about origins later in life. The chapter explores whether there is evidence to indicate that a particular type of substitute care received may have made a difference to people's need to know about their backgrounds, perhaps because of the way in which it met, or failed to meet, the child's needs. Residential care and especially foster care are very much the 'poor relations' when it comes to research compared with adoption The need has only relatively recently been recognised to develop measures to assess outcomes of different social work interventions with children looked after away from home.
