This poster, presented at the Annual Meeting of the Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences, provides an overview of a study on foster children's sense of belonging.
Introduction
In general, children placed in foster care define their families by mixing biological family and host family relationships (Biehal, 2014). Thus, the sense of belonging to the family of origin does not prevent the establishment of a sense of belonging to the host family (Christiansen et al., 2013). However, this may induce conflict of loyalties. Some foster children are loyal both to their biological parents, for whom they may feel ambivalent feelings, and to their foster parents, with whom they live and who are their source of protection and security. They could potentially be disturbed by these feelings of loyalty that seem incompatible (Maaskant et al., 2015; Atwool, 2013). The aim of this research was to question foster children and their family about their sense of belonging. Moreover, we questioned the children about their perception of the people constituting their family. Finally, conflict of loyalties was investigated in order to understand how children felt living in a foster family while keeping in touch with their biological family. In this study, two hypotheses were tested. First, the child tends to include in the conception of his or her family the people with whom he or she lives on a daily basis (Gardner, 1996; 2004). In this way, his or her sense of belonging would be more present in relation to his or her host family. Second, conflict of loyalties may exist (Maaskant et al., 2015; Atwool, 2013).
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