I want to thank everyone who took the time out to answer the survey questions last month. I'm going to begin sharing the information here and hope that it will help us understand how we can grow this community to best serve each other.

I'm going to follow the trajectory of the presentation I gave on March 29th in Portland, OR at the American Adoption Conference and will use some of the same slides as well.

Requests to answer the survey were posted here, at my own blog, at several other blogs including the Adoption.com first parents blog, in at least one livejournal community and (according to the folks who posted there) in some messageboard communities. 289 people answered the survey with this breakdown of respondents:

Note: At least two adoptive parents (as apparent from their answers) answered the question as adoptees. Possibly other people misidentified themselves as well but those are the only two I caught. Without correcting for misidentification the exact numbers of respondents are:

Adoptees: 22

First Parents: 55

Adoptive Parents: 199

Extended First Family: 2

Extended Adoptive Family: 4

By far, most of the adoptees who took the survey were adult adopted persons who grew up in closed adoptions. Because of this we got very little data about open adoptions from an adoptee perspective. (Those who did talk about first family contact were usually -- but not always -- talking about post-reunion contact.)

Also quite a few adoptive parents were answering from the perspective of parenting in closed international adoptions.

Tomorrow I'll bring up some of the criticism participants raised about the survey.