Bowlby proposed that the individual's social experiences, as early as in infancy, contribute to the construction of Internal Working Models (IWMs) of attachment, which will later guide the individual's expectations and behaviors in close relationships all along his or her life. The qualitative, individual characteristics of these models reflect the specificity of the individual's early experiences with attachment figures. The attachment literature globally shows that the qualities of IWMs are neither gender specific nor cultural specific. Procedures to evaluate IWMs in adulthood have been well established, based on narrative accounts of childhood experiences. Narrative procedures at earlier ages (e.g., in the preschool years) have been proposed, such as Bretherton's Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT), to evaluate attachment representations. More than 500 ASCT narratives of preschoolers, coming from five different countries, have been collected, in the perspective of examining possible interactions between gender and culture regarding attachment representations. A specific Q-Sort coding procedure (CCH) has been used to evaluate several dimensions of the narratives. Girls' narratives appeared as systematically more secure than those of same-age boys, whatever their culture. The magnitude of gender differences, however, varied between countries. Taylor's model of gender-specific responses to stress and Harwood's and Posada's hypothesis on inter-cultural differences regarding caregiving are evoked to understand the differences across gender and countries.

Low agreement between self report and parent report on the behavioral adjustment of adolescents has been widely documented in the literature. However, it has been little studied in connection with adoptees. In the current research, the magnitude of agreement between adolescents and their parents' reports of adolescents' behavioral problems and the direction of the possible discrepancies between these reports are studied. A comparison is made between adopted and non-adopted adolescent-parent dyads. The research questions are tested in a study with a sample size of 784 adolescent-parent pairs (309 adopted and 475 control adolescents) from Belgium, Romania, Chili, Switzerland, Italy, and the Netherlands. Because of an imbalance in the number of adopted and control adolescents per country, a more balanced dataset of 189 adoptees and 104 controls was used in the central analyses. Results showed that both the magnitude of agreement and the direction of the discrepancies in internalizing and externalizing behavioral ratings between informants, i.e. parents and their adolescent, does not depend on the adolescent's status, i.e. adopted or non-adopted. Compared to their parents, both adopted and control adolescents reported problems more frequently.Slight variations in the magnitude of agreement were found between countries. An interaction effect between gender and informant indicated that discrepancies for internalizing behavior were higher in parent-adolescent daughter than in parent-adolescent son pairs.

No abstract

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Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.