Adoption Data Analysis & Visualization

Growing up as an adoptee in a mixed-race household, I became fascinated with what external forces led to shaping a family like mine and how many people share a similar experience. This page is a work in progress of different analysis I've done to try to capture the adoption experience.

Word Cloud Analysis

The following word clouds were generated from adoption-related Reddit discussions and adoption-related blogs, showing the most frequent terms used by different groups in the adoption community. I was curious to see what, if any, different words do people use to describe the adoption process.

Methodology:
  • Data collected from Reddit adoption-related subreddits and adoption-related blogs
  • Text processing and cleaning to remove common stopwords and punctuation
  • Lemmatization to reduce words to their base form
  • Normalization to handle variations in naming conventions. For example, "adoption" and "adoptee" are the same word.
  • Word frequency analysis by user group (adoptees, adoptive parents, birth parents)
  • Generated using Python wordcloud library

Adoptive Parents
Word Cloud for Adoptive Parents
Most common words used by adoptive parents in online discussions
Adoptees
Word Cloud for Adoptees
Most common words used by adoptees in online discussions
Adoptees and Adopters
Word Cloud for Adoptees and Adopters
Most common words in combined adoptee and adopter discussions
Birth Parents
Word Cloud for Birth Parents
Most common words used by birth parents in online discussions
High-Frequency Words Common to All Categories
High-Frequency Words Common to All Categories
Words that appear frequently across all adoption community groups

Interactive Data Visualizations

Interactive scatter plots showing the relationship between GDP per capita and international adoption rates across different countries and years. Bubble size represents the number of adoptions.

Adoption Rates vs GDP per Capita - Countries of Origin
This plot shows the relationship between a country's GDP per capita and the number of children adopted from that country. Countries with higher GDP per capita tend to have fewer children available for international adoption.
Adoption Rates vs GDP per Capita - Receiving Countries
This plot shows the relationship between a country's GDP per capita and the number of children adopted by that country. Wealthier countries typically have higher adoption rates.
Methodology & Data Sources
Statistical Analysis:
  • Adoption statistics from Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption (HCCH)
  • GDP per capita data from World Bank
  • Country name normalization to handle variations in naming conventions
  • Interactive visualizations created with Plotly
Key Insights:
  • Countries with higher GDP per capita tend to be receiving countries rather than countries of origin
  • Adoption rates have declined globally in recent years
  • Different groups in the adoption community use distinct vocabulary patterns
  • Common themes across all groups include family, love, and identity
Citations & References