The concept of attachment has been discussed and debated in the psychological literature for quite some time. More recently, the concept of attachment has been extended to adults, and several measures that purport to measure attachment style have been developed. The purpose of the present study was to provide a reliability generalization study of five of the most prominent adult attachment style measures. Reliability generalization, a relatively new meta-analytic reliability procedure, was used to (a) identify the typical reliability of scores across instruments and studies and (b) examine sources of measurement error across instruments and studies. Results from this investigation of 154 previously published research studies indicated that the average score reliability across studies varied considerably across instruments and subscales. Implications for the use of self-report measures of adult attachment style are offered.Most former psychology students can remember back to their "Psychological Tests and Measurements" course and recall hearing something similar to, "A test is useful to the extent that it is reliable and valid." This ubiquitous phrase implicitly teaches students to conceptualize these two cornerstones of testing as fixed and nascent qualities of the test itself. Although students also typically learn in the same course that sample-specific
The concept of attachment has been discussed and debated in the psychological literature for quite some time. More recently, the concept of attachment has been extended to adults, and several measures that purport to measure attachment style have been developed. The purpose of the present study was to provide a reliability generalization study of five of the most prominent adult attachment style measures. Reliability generalization, a relatively new meta-analytic reliability procedure, was used to (a) identify the typical reliability of scores across instruments and studies and (b) examine sources of measurement error across instruments and studies. Results from this investigation of 154 previously published research studies indicated that the average score reliability across studies varied considerably across instruments and subscales. Implications for the use of self-report measures of adult attachment style are offered.Most former psychology students can remember back to their "Psychological Tests and Measurements" course and recall hearing something similar to, "A test is useful to the extent that it is reliable and valid." This ubiquitous phrase implicitly teaches students to conceptualize these two cornerstones of testing as fixed and nascent qualities of the test itself. Although students also typically learn in the same course that sample-specific
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