Action Research in Psychology: The Case of Adoptive Family

In this chapter, we outline the way we understand action research and the usefulness of textual data analysis. Accordingly, we present a research work aiming to shed light on how adoptive mothers make sense of adoptee’s requests to get information about their biological origin. We analyzed narrative data from 37 interviewed adopters. The analysis identified the thematic contents of the interviews (clusters) and meaning dimensions (factors) organizing them. Moreover, a regression model and variance analysis were conducted to shed light on the difficulty encountered by adoptive mothers in accompanying their children towards the rediscovery of biological origins, and how this difficulty is linked to the time elapsed since the adoption.