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

Abstract

We examined representations of attachment security using story stem narratives (Manchester Attachment Story Task, MCAST) and a family drawing task in 50 Greek children between 4 and 6 years old. Additionally, we examined the association between attachment classification based on the family drawing task and maternal reports of social and emotional symptoms assessed using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Attachment security classification based on the MCAST was not significantly associated with attachment security classification based on the family drawings. There was a small to medium strength significant association between drawing-based insecure attachment classification and higher scores on conduct problems and inattention/hyperactivity ratings. However, the associations were not statistically significant after controlling for the effects of child gender, and maternal education and age. The findings are discussed in relation to the properties of the family drawing task to measure attachment security in the preschool and early middle childhood years.

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.…”

Draw yourself: How culture influences drawings by children between the ages of two and fifteen

“…Continuing our research would allow us to discover the wealth of information contained in children’s works in greater depth. Our methodology could be applied to examine psychological and emotional traits measured through questionnaire ( Kallitsoglou et al, 2021 ) or direct observation ( Shiakou, 2012 ).…”

Editorial: Children's drawings: evidence-based research and practice

“…One of the major uses of drawing is as a tool for assessing the psychological and relational wellbeing of children and adolescents. In clinical and legal settings, the Family Drawing test is among the most widely used projective tests for assessing the quality of a child's family relationships with a scoring system for assessing attachment (Kallitsoglou et al, 2022 ). In their opinion paper, Pace et al discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the Family Drawing test with such an attachment-based coding system.…”