Children’s attachment representations: A pilot study comparing family drawing with narrative and behavioral assessments in adopted and community children

Children’s family drawings: association with attachment representations in story stem narratives and social and emotional difficulties

“…Jin et al (2018) report that they relied on overall attachment classification and not on individual signs, whereas the coding scheme we used included part of the original individual signs (n = 53) included in the original Kaplan and Main (1986) scheme (Pianta & Longmaid, 1999). On the other hand, it is worth noting that Pace et al (2020) also failed to find a match between secure and insecure classification on the family drawings and the MCAST in a small sample of Italian children between the ages of 5 and 8 years old. The findings suggest that further research is required to identify what is the optimal age to use the family drawing task as a valid method of attachment security assessment while ensuring consistency in attachment coding system use.…”

Family drawing for assessing attachment in children: Weaknesses and strengths

“…Concerning the concurrent validity, studies in different populations of children (i.e., community, clinical, adopted, etc. ) showed the attachment-based FD results partially converged with those of the gold-standard SSP and the Manchester Child Attachment Story Task (MCAST; Goldwyn et al, 2000), a completion task used to assess attachment representations in 4-8 years old children and rated both through four ABCD classifications and 1-to 9-point scales (Jin et al, 2018;Pace et al, 2020;Kallitsoglou et al, 2021).…”

“…Specifically, Jin et al (2018) suggested convergence in both classifications and scales of community and (especially) clinical children. Pace et al (2020) reported convergence of more scales in communities than in at-risk children, and Kallitsoglou et al (2021) suggested no convergence of scales among the communities. Overall, these results are too heterogeneous to assume that FD can be as trustable as other more validated attachment measures in assessing attachment, and further studies are needed.…”

Overheating in Schools: Factors Determining Children’s Perceptions of Overall Comfort Indoors

“…Drawings are also used as part of mixed methods, as well as triangulated with other evaluation techniques that support or refute the results, often applied in the child population. Well-known and validated drawing tests are Draw-a-man Test (DAMT), Family Drawing, linked to Attachment Theory [48], or Kinetic Family Drawing [49], validated with others, such as problem behavior tests, to predict and mediate internal childhood behavior problems [49]. Researchers often compare with questionnaires and objective visual indicators and given insights on familiar relationships, following the art-based phenomenological analytic approach [50].…”