Part 1

When children are adopted, they are sometimes taken from one cultural group and transplanted to another. In some cases, the adoptive families ignore or overlook the former culture. In other cases, families learn about the former culture and teach children the best that they can.

Using the Internet, South University Online Library, and other sources, conduct research on the topic of adoption and how it relates to culture, particularly with respect to parents who adopt children from dissimilar cultural groups.

In your response, address the following:

• The process of enculturation starts early and is often learned incidentally. Let’s say that an adoptive family adopts a child from a drastically different cultural group. If the family makes an effort, would it be able to teach the child about the culture of his or her biological family? Using some of the terminology from the course, elaborate your answer. Include the challenges that parents might face as they try to teach the child about a culture that is foreign to them.

• Would the educational process be more difficult for cultures that have an oral tradition? What about all of the customs and practices that are taught through demonstration and imitation?

• Consider what happens as the child grows up and interacts with others in the society. Does the age of adoption or physical appearance (e.g., the child has skin color and hair that is different from his adoptive family) play a role in whether the adoptive family should make an effort to teach the child about his or her former culture? Explain your answer.

Part 2

SWB is based on how the quality of a person’s life is and how satisfied a person is with his or her life. When determining a person’s level of well-being, a person factors in things such as moods, emotion, general satisfaction, and specific satisfaction into his or her mental equation. Studies show that SWB is positively related to health, and healthy people tend to report that they are happier than unhealthy people as they do not live with pain or serious physical limitations. To some extent, SWB is also tied to wealth. However, there are other variables that are important to SWB.

In your response, address the following:

• Research SWB and wealth. Do wealthier people report greater SWB than the people who are not wealthy? Discuss the relationship between SWB and wealth—consider the spectrum of socioeconomic levels from those who cannot meet their basic needs to those who have an abundance of material possessions. Is the relationship between SWB and wealth positive and linear, or does it become less linear as people become extremely wealthy? In the context of this course, discuss whether there are cultural differences in SWB that do not seem to be simply related to wealth.

• Happiness is one way to measure SWB. Search the South University Online Library and the Internet to find scholarly research articles on happiness and well-being. Discuss your findings. Some studies indicate that there is another variable that is important for maintaining a high level of SWB. State the variable and discuss whether there is some universal aspect to this finding. (Does the outstanding variable stay relatively consistent across cultures?)

• Some societies have a relatively even wealth distribution. Discuss how the societal wealth distribution impacts the SWB of a cultural group.