During the 1980's a number of psychologists, working independently, developed instruments to measure different aspects of attachment behaviour. This chapter will describe the reasons for selecting three particular attachment measures. It will describe their properties and evaluate their strengths and limitations.
Requirements of the present research
The concept of attachment has been developed into a complex construct with a variety of dimensions that can be explored and measured. These include:
The infant's relationship with its carer, encompassing the carer's availability and responsiveness and the infant's ability to elicit this behaviour.
The categorization of the individual's internal working models of attachment Patterns of insecure attachment observed by Bowlby (1979) in adolescent and adult clinical populations.
Adults' perceptions and memories of their early relationships with their own parents.
Adolescents' perceptions and memories of their early parental relationships Adolescents' current relationships with their parents
Adolescent peer relationships Adult love relationships.
From the variety of measures and methods available, three tests to gauge current adolescent attachment have been selected. The Parental Attachment Questionnaire (PAQ), the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (IPPA) and the Hazan and Shaver measure of attachment are each assessed according to the following criteria.
a) Theoretical consistency
Measures of attachment behaviour have been developed by researchers working from different theoretical perspectives, such as family systems and behavioural models. However, since the present research and its hypotheses have developed from Attachment theory, those instruments for measuring attachment which share the same theoretical base are the most appropriate because they are most likely to be measuring a shared construct of attachment. This should ensure that the data being collected will reflect and measure those particular aspects of late adolescent attachment to parents which are most relevant to these hypotheses.
b)Psychometric properties
Attachment measures should have good, proven psychometric properties. In discussing the principles of measurement Oppenheim (1992) suggests that measuring instruments can be evaluated in terms of their :
1) uni-dimensionality or homogeneity 2) reliability
3) validity
4) scoring system and statistical norms.
A measuring instrument which has already been used by different researchers in a variety of studies is most desirable for the present study because reliability and validity will have been tested by independent psychologists who are presumably more objective than those developing the tests. If the results of independent and/or repeated research indicate high correlation coefficients for reliability and validity the measure can be assumed to have good psychometric properties.
c) Suitability for 16 - 20 year old F. E. student subjects
The proposed subject population consists of 16 to 20 year old students at a college of further education. The attachment measures must be appropriate for this age-group and preferably already standardized on the same age population. In addition this student population is drawn from a wide socio-economic range, a mixed academic ability range and a wide cultural base. (Details may be found in the Subject section
for each study.) Each item of a measure must be relevant to and answerable by each individual subject or the scores obtained would be meaningless. Some attachment measures have already been used on diverse adolescent populations and have been found to remain stable and reliable.
The experimental design requires 200-300 "normal" student subjects to be tested on attachment measures. For practical purposes, including substantial time-saving and efficiency, the measures need to be undertaken by a large number of students simultaneously. This rules out measures requiring individual interviews and indicates self-report measures which have full instructions and can be self-administered. There are a number of disadvantages in the use of self-report measures and these are more fully addressed in the evaluations below. However, these limitations are generally outweighed by the advantages of giving self-report measures to this population. Firstly, the subjects can be assured of confidentiality. Secondly, many of them appear to enjoy filling out questionnaires and so are likely to co-operate. Thirdly they can easily understand the focus of the research from the questions and so are less likely to fear a hidden agenda or manipulation by the experimenter.
d) Focus on measuring attachment in the adolescent-parent relationship
The present study was designed to investigate ongoing parent-adolescent relationships in relation to ongoing adjustment at college. Thus instruments which focus on adolescents' retrospective ratings of parental care, such as Parker, Tupling and Brown's (1979) Parental Bonding Instrument, would not be pertinent measures.
In addition to focusing on present relationships, a quantifiable measure of attachment was required. Theoretically an attachment relationship, the enduring affectional bond between two people, can be perceived as falling on a continuum between very strong, secure attachment and very weak insecure attachment. Some instruments designed to quantify the point on this continuum for a particular adolescent-parent relationship, measure different aspects or dimensions of attachment behaviour, which are judged to reflect the level of attachment and which can be recognized and rated by the adolescent.
e) Ability to categorize style of attachment
An adolescent's internalized working model of attachment may be related to his or her performance in the adolescent equivalent of the "strange situation" which is to be measured as adjustment to college. A measure which could categorize this model or style of attachment would provide useful information.
f) Ability to assess change
This research also calls for a valid measure which will assess the change in attachment in clinical clients after counselling has focused on the parent-adolescent relationship. A measure of attachment which can be given before counselling and repeated after counselling is required. Scores can then be compared.
g) Qualitative information
If, in addition, the measure can identify aspects of attachment behaviour which change in response to counselling, this will help to inform counsellors of how they can work more effectively to enhance adolescent-parent relationships.
The variety of these requirements suggests that a single measure would not be sufficient.
Three measuring instruments have been selected and they are described and evaluated below.