Intercountry adoption requires adoptive parents to assume their parenthood as well as to acknowledge the cultural and ethnic origins of their child. Narratives are effective means to help individuals cope with non-normative transitions, including adoption, as they allow them to make sense of and legitimise their experiences. This qualitative study sought to extend knowledge about the value of using narrative methods with adoptive families to explore how the language they employ determines the ways in which they perceive situations and vice versa. It uses the word-driven textual analysis software T-LAB to identify key topics highlighted by parents and analyse them in relation to specific variables. Child characteristics, such as gender, age at adoption and birth country, and family variables, such as mother’s and father’s narratives and first or not-first parenting experience, were considered. From the 37 narratives sampled, those parents adopting from Asia and Eastern Europe, mothers and first-time parents faced the most challenges.

跨国收养要求养父母承担他们的父母身份，并承认他们孩子的文化和种族起源。叙事是帮助个人应对非规范性转变（包括采用）的有效手段，因为它们使他们能够理解自己的经历并使之合法化。这项定性研究旨在扩展有关对收养家庭使用叙述方法的价值的知识，以探索他们使用的语言如何决定他们感知情况的方式，反之亦然。它使用单词驱动的文本分析软件 T-LAB 来识别父母强调的关键主题，并根据特定变量对其进行分析。儿童特征，例如性别、收养年龄和出生国家以及家庭变量，例如母亲和父亲的叙述以及第一次或非第一次养育经历，都被考虑在内。在抽样的 37 个叙述中，从亚洲和东欧收养的父母、母亲和初为人父母面临的挑战最大。