The brief Experiences in Close Relationships Scale - Revised Child version (ECR-RC): Factor structure and invariance across middle childhood and early adolescence

Abstract

The recently developed short form of the Experiences in Close Relationships Scale-Revised Child version (ECR-RC) is a promising tool to assess anxious and avoidant attachment in children and adolescents. Yet, evidence concerning its validity in middle childhood is limited. This study aimed to test the psychometric properties of the 12-item ECR-RC for both mother and father forms in a sample of 448 Italian children (50.2% girls) aged between 8 and 13 years. The scale was adapted by changing the response format to make it more understandable for young children. Psychometric proprieties of the brief ECR-RC were investigated by testing its factor structure and internal consistency, invariance across middle childhood and early adolescence, and concurrent and convergent validity. A series of confirmatory factor analyses provided support for the two-factor structure (i.e., anxiety and avoidance) of the ECR-RC, and multi-group confirmatory factor analyses supported its invariance across middle childhood and early adolescence. Older children reported significantly higher latent mean values in avoidant attachment to both parents compared to their younger counterparts. Furthermore, the questionnaire showed evidence of concurrent and convergent validity. Our results indicate that the 12-item version of the ECR-RC is a psychometrically robust instrument to assess avoidance and anxiety toward mother and father among Italian children and early adolescents.

Development and Psychometric Properties of a New Self-Report Questionnaire Measuring Attachment in School-Age Children: The Attachment in Middle Childhood Questionnaire (AMCQ)

“…When we evaluated the associations of the two models with a number of external measures, namely self-worth and children's perception of social support from friends and family, the expected correlations were found for the twofactor model, with children's responses to mother and father items showing similar associations with the external measures. More specifically, and in line with previous studies (i.e., Brenning et al, 2011;Marci et al, 2018b), lower levels of anxiety and avoidance toward both mother and father were related to higher self-worth. This finding is consistent with attachment theory, which posits that the quality of attachment has important implications for the development of the self (Cassidy, 1990;Mikulincer, 1998;Mikulincer & Shaver, 2012).…”

“…First, we performed a CFA on the two-and three-factor models and, focusing on the conceptual question of whether the third security factor in association with the two insecurity dimensions (i.e., anxiety and avoidance) may better explain attachment representations during middle childhood (see Lionetti et al, 2018;Younger et al, 2005), we compared fit indexes of the two-and three-factor models. Consistent with previous research testing the factor structure of the ECR-RC in children and adolescents (see Brenning et al, 2014;Marci et al, 2018b;Skoczeń et al, 2019) and the results of studies using the ECR and the ECR-R with adults (see Cameron et al, 2012, for an overview), we expected to find a medium-to-high positive correlation between the anxiety and avoidance dimensions. Furthermore, we anticipated to find a negative association between both insecurity dimensions and the security factor.…”

“…Items were scrutinized for content and sentence formulation (e.g., unambiguous wording), and were subsequently selected based on their appropriateness in capturing one of the three dimensions (i.e., security, anxiety, and avoidance) also by taking the results of previous work on the factor structure of the two instruments into account (Brenning et al, 2011;Brenning et al, 2014;Marci et al, 2018aMarci et al, , 2018bSkoczeń et al, 2019).…”

“…Attachment. To test convergent validity of the AMCQ, children completed the Italian version of the short form of the ECR-RC (Brenning et al, 2014;Marci et al, 2018b). The questionnaire consists of 12 items designed to capture attachment anxiety and avoidance in children and adolescents.…”

Using Harter and Likert Response Formats in Middle Childhood: A Comparison of Attachment Measures

“…Within the attachment field, self-reports specifically designed for school-age children have been developed following Harter’s (1982) format, while tools originally designed for use with adolescents and adults and subsequently adapted for younger children use the Likert format. In this article, we focused on two widely used questionnaires designed to measure attachment in middle childhood, namely the Italian versions of the ECR-RC (Marci, Moscardino, & Altoè, 2019) and the SS (Marci, Lionetti et al, 2018). The former has a Likert-type scale response format, in line with the original scale used with adults (ECR, Fraley, Waller, & Brennan, 2000), whereas the latter has Harter’s (1982) format.…”