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Families adopting children from China submit data on their adoptions, which are analyzed weekly. These charts show the dossier-to-China (DTC) to referral waiting time, the referral to travel waiting time, and the age of children at referral for twelve month's worth of referrals. The individual blue '+' marks on the charts represent individual children. The heavy red line in each chart represents a fourteen-day centered moving average of the same points. The vertical scale of each chart is intended to allow all "normal" times to show. Occasionally, a few referrals will not be within this normal range, and will not be shown on the graph. A notation at the bottom of the graph will indicate how many referrals are not shown on that chart.
The left-hand three graphs are plotted by DTC date. The middle three graphs are plotted by referral date, which may help you visualize the current trends. Since the "matching room" of the China Center for Adoption Affairs seems to do most of its work during the last month before referral, the trends based on referral date may be more significant than those viewed from the DTC-based charts.
The right-hand three graphs are a summary of the previous 12 months of referrals in histogram form. A histogram is just a chart of the "spread" in the data. You can see how many referrals fell into a particular range of waiting time, travel time, or child's age.
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If you find this set of graphs interesting, you might like to see a similar set for the entire database from January 1996 to present, with a 2-month moving average.
Many readers of this page have observed that referrals don't seem to come at a uniform rate. There will be a flurry of happy referral announcements to the APC list ( a-parents-china email list), followed by a lull during which the next expectant group of parents gets increasingly anxious. To help see this more clearly, the next graph shows the number of referrals per week for the entire period covered by the database. Obviously, only the CCAA would be able to say just how they determine when to issue batches of referrals, and I am not in contact with them. Feel free to attempt your own correlation between the graph and Chinese holidays, world events, phase of the moon, or other significant factors.
If you would like some assistance in estimating the arrival of your own referral, you might find the "Referral Calculator" at Bright Outlooks helpful. These researchers use my database with their statistical models to try to predict referral waiting times. A useful graph appears on Steve King's blog, http://babygraceking.blogspot.com. This graph is apparently based on notices posted on the CCAA website. It shows number of months each group of dossiers spent in the "matching room" and the "review room" of the CCAA by log-in date.
You might also be interested in discussions of why referral waiting times have increased so much. Brian Stuy of Research-China.org has spent a lot of time interviewing Chinese orphanages and has a number of thoughtful articles on issues surrounding adoption in China.
12mo 12mo 12mo 2wk
avg most sample avg
common size
----------------------------------------------------
dtc to referral (days): 615 276 43 739
ref to travel (days): 50 52 111 49
age at referral (mo.s): 10 8 42 12
The "12mo avg" column is the mean of the data set for the twelve months preceding the most recent referral, and the "12mo most common" column is the mode of weekly averages for this same set of data. Because new referrals cause year-old ones to drop out of the calculations, the sample size may fluctuate up or down depending on whether or not there were more referrals this week than there were 53 weeks ago. The "2wk avg" column is the mean for the most recent two weeks of referrals.
Feb-96 1 May-96 14 Jun-96 30 Jul-96 13 Aug-96 4 Sep-96 11 Oct-96 28 Nov-96 33 Dec-96 46 Jan-97 32 Feb-97 42 Mar-97 29 Apr-97 39 May-97 44 Jun-97 34 Jul-97 37 Aug-97 44 Sep-97 44 Oct-97 37 Nov-97 26 Dec-97 21 Jan-98 22 Feb-98 30 Mar-98 41 Apr-98 25 May-98 27 Jun-98 25 Jul-98 45 Aug-98 68 Sep-98 72 Oct-98 36 Nov-98 59 Dec-98 77 Jan-99 73 Feb-99 72 Mar-99 86 Apr-99 84 May-99 88 Jun-99 64 Jul-99 95 Aug-99 120 Sep-99 117 Oct-99 80 Nov-99 82 Dec-99 77 Jan-00 82 Feb-00 78 Mar-00 112 Apr-00 102 May-00 71 Jun-00 81 Jul-00 78 Aug-00 101 Sep-00 77 Oct-00 79 Nov-00 77 Dec-00 94 Jan-01 94 Feb-01 33 Mar-01 65 Apr-01 85 May-01 65 Jun-01 55 Jul-01 73 Aug-01 52 Sep-01 59 Oct-01 63 Nov-01 155 Dec-01 23 Jan-02 37 Feb-02 63 Mar-02 62 Apr-02 25 May-02 16 Jun-02 20 Jul-02 15 Aug-02 19 Sep-02 27 Oct-02 19 Nov-02 29 Dec-02 11 Jan-03 25 Feb-03 23 Mar-03 24 Apr-03 15 May-03 18 Jun-03 16 Jul-03 26 Aug-03 32 Sep-03 19 Oct-03 23 Nov-03 21 Dec-03 26 Jan-04 21 Feb-04 23 Mar-04 25 Apr-04 37 May-04 17 Jun-04 18 Jul-04 47 Aug-04 34 Sep-04 30 Oct-04 36 Nov-04 24 Dec-04 25 Jan-05 25 Feb-05 23 Mar-05 39 Apr-05 44 May-05 36 Jun-05 30 Jul-05 28 Aug-05 31 Sep-05 21 Oct-05 21 Nov-05 14 Dec-05 6
NOTE: There may have been a few referrals for DTC's more recent than those shown here, but if they were unusually short waits due to unusual circumstances, they have not been included in the tabulations, including the table above.
The DTC date is subject to an uncertainty of about +/- 3 weeks, since many agencies do not tell clients when the dossier is actually delivered to the China Center for Adoption Affairs, the Chinese government agency responsible for adoption processing. Dossiers have sometimes spent weeks in the hands of an agency facilitator in China before being delivered to the CCAA. It also seems to be pretty clear that the CCAA "batches" dossiers, processing a batch over a period of time and then mailing all the referrals for the batch at once. These factors make it difficult to make predictions about time of referral from the statistics.
Another factor is that the APC list ( a-parents-china email list) represents a small subset of the total number of parents adopting from China, but the majority of the data in this database. This data is probably not uniformly distributed through all agencies either. There is some evidence that the CCAA processes dossiers agency by agency, so when there is a lull of referrals to APC subscribers, there may be many others receiving referrals that do not make it into this data, and when a flurry of referrals are posted to the APC list there may be other groups experiencing a slowdown. To get an idea of the degree this data represents the entire group of American adoptive parents, we have compared the number of referrals in our database per year with the number of orphan visas issued by the US State Department in China each year (Federal Fiscal year, Oct 1 - Sept 31). For simplicity, we assume one month referral to travel delay in determining which referrals go in which fiscal year (since many families never add travel date to their data).
| Fiscal Year | Total Visas | APC Data | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY1997 | 3597 | 191 | 5% |
| FY1998 | 4243 | 754 | 18% |
| FY1999 | 4108 | 776 | 19% |
| FY2000 | 5058 | 935 | 18% |
| FY2001 | 4705 | 721 | 15% |
| FY2002 | 4677 | 800 | 17% |
| FY2003 | 6857 | 681 | 10% |
| FY2004 | 7038 | 372 | 5% |
| FY2005 | 7903 | 326 | 4% |
| FY2006 | 6492 | 215 | 3% |
| FY2007 | 5453 | 113 | 2% |
| FY2008 | 3911 | 10 | 0% |
Keep these things in mind when attempting to draw conclusions from the graphs and tables.
If you have received a referral of a child from China, please fill out the form at http://chinastats.org/adoptionform.php so your information can become part of the statistics.
If you have questions or comments about the graphs or tables, please send them to Ralph Stirling, stirra@wallawalla.edu.
If you have a craving to play with the data yourself (a sure sign you have too much time on your hands while waiting for a referral :-), you may obtain raw DTC, referral, and birthdates (with no identifying information) here.