We would like to acknowledge the help of the many people who made this study possible, some of whom cannot be named individually for reasons of confidentiality. The research was funded by The Nuffield Foundation and was carried out in 2012 and 2013. Firstly we would like to thank all the adopted young people, adoptive parents and birth relatives who took part in the study. Their willingness to share their personal experiences and to take time to fill in questionnaires was vital to the success of the project. We would also like to thank the social workers and administrative staff from the participating adoption agencies who assisted us in tracing participants whose contact details were out of date. We are grateful to the help of After Adoption who assisted us in recruiting a group of adopted young people to advise us on the early stages of the study, and of course to the young people themselves who made many valuable suggestions which informed our data collection strategy
