Discriminant Validity of the Adult Attachment Interview

Abstract

The Adult Attachment Interview is a semi-structured interview developed to investigate adults' attachment representations. Subjects are asked to describe their parents as caregivers, explain these descriptions, describe how their parents typically responded to distress, and discuss their current relationships with their parents. They are also asked to describe any significant losses and/or instances of abuse during childhood. Scoring focuses on the accessibility of early experiences to memory and the coherence and plausibility of the subject's narrative. Discriminant validity is always an important issue with such measures because IQ and other cognitively loaded variables offer plausible alternative interpretations or represent important correlates that should be treated as covariates when the measure is used. In addition, complex, multifaceted interviews always pose the risk of assessing general social adjustment rather than a more narrowly defined construct. This study examines the discriminant validity of the AAI vis(-)à-vis intelligence, social desirability, discourse style, and general social adjustment in a sample of 53 native-English-speaking, married women with preschool children. They were assessed with the AAI, a written IQ test, the Social Adjustment Scale, the Employment Experience Interview (discourse style), and a measure of social desirability. There were modest but significant correlations with IQ scores and social adjustment. There was no relation between AAI classifications and discourse style or social desirability. These results substantially strengthen the case for interpreting the AAI as an attachment-related measure.

The quality of the parenting alliance during the transition to parenthood.

“…Second, the current investigation relied on self-report measures, and common method variance could account, at least in part, for the observed associations. In the same vein, assessing attachment by using questionnaires, as opposed to interviews, does capture conscious aspects of attachment representations but ignores unconscious aspects (Crowell et al, 1996;Treboux et al, 2004). Third, because the sample includes more francophones and more cohabiting couples than would a sample from other parts of Canada, on these aspects, the sample is not fully representative of average Canadian couples.…”

“…Questionnaires measure conscious aspects of the attachment relationship, whereas with interviews, it is the way the adult presents his or her story (not the events described) that is considered the key element of attachment representation (Crowell et al, 1996;Treboux et al, 2004). More precisely, secure attachment has been found to correlate positively, and insecure attachment negatively, with relationship satisfaction or other related aspects of romantic relationships (Banse, 2004;Paley et al, 2005;Rholes, Simpson, Campbell, & Grich, 2001).…”

On the irrationality of emotion and the rationality of awareness

“…For example, individuals who are judged incoherent with regard to answering questions about their attachment experiences, may well give coherent accounts of other domains, e.g. of their work-related experiences (Crowell et al, 1996). Furthermore, the attachment classifications on the Adult Attachment interview are unrelated to intelligence, including assessments specific to verbal fluency (van IJzendoorn, 1995).…”

Traumatic and Adverse Attachment Childhood Experiences are not Characteristic of OCD but of Depression in Adolescents

“…The validity of the AAI is good [53] and AAI classifications discriminate attachment phenomena from possible confounders (e.g., gender, verbal intelligence, episodic memory, social desirability and general speech styles) [53,54], and they are strongly related to infant attachment classifications [55] and to various other theoretically expected correlates (see Hesse [48] for a review). The reliability (e.g.…”

“…First, the interview is not the ideal setting for eliciting negative life events, apart from those associated with attachment relationships. Secondly, the rules for inferring childhood experience may not be fully applicable in clinical populations, as all studies of the AAI discriminative validity [53,54] have been conducted in normal populations. A paucity of childhood memories in the AAI may not express defensive exclusion, but a memory deficit as has been shown to occur in paediatric OCD [64,65] or be due to executive functioning problems [64,[66][67][68][69][70].…”