The Short Attachment to Pets Scale (SAPS) for Children and Young People: Development, Psychometric Qualities and Demographic and Health Associations

Abstract

This study describes the development of the SAPS and investigates its reliability and validity within the context of the Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children Survey (HBSC) which gathered data on representative samples of school pupils aged 11, 13 and 15 in Scotland and England. In the development of SAPS, following a comprehensive review of the literature, two small-scale empirical studies were carried out (one qualitative and one quantitative). Regarding the validation process, the reliability and validity of the SAPS was assessed in a sub-sample (n= 7159) of pupils who completed the HBSC survey and were identified as owning pets. Factor analysis resulted in a one-factor solution (explaining 67.78 % of the variance); Cronbach's alpha for the scale was 0.894. The item-total correlation ranged from 0.368 to 0.784. A linear model showed that attachment to pets was associated with age (being 11 or 13 years old), being a girl, white ethnicity, and considering a pet as one's own. SAPS scores were also positively associated with quality of life. The total variance in SAPS explained by these variables was 15.7 %. Effect sizes of associations were medium (age, considering a pet as one's own) and small (ethnicity, age, gender, quality of life). The study concludes that SAPS is a coherent and psychometrically sound measure. It is associated with a range of demographic variables and quality of life, which confirms its utility as a new succinct measure of children's and young people's attachment to pets for use in health and social science research.

Differences in boys' and girls' attachment to pets in early-mid adolescence

“…Findings that are suggestive of differences are consistent with the human attachment literature and more recent studies that find girls reporting stronger attachment to pets (Marsa-Sambola et al, 2016;Muldoon et al, 2019). While Melson (1990) considered animal care to be 'gender neutral', this finding has not been echoed in recent work by Muldoon et al (2015) particularly, for example, with respect to cleaning out pets cages.…”

“…Moreover, time spent caring for/playing with a pet was not associated with better health and well-being. In keeping with this finding of diminishing interactions, attachment to pets has been found to decrease with age (Marsa-Sambola et al, 2016). Muldoon, Williams, Lawrence, and Currie (2019) looked at children/adolescents with different types of pet, finding attachment to be stronger in the youngest age group regardless of the type of pet they had.…”

“…The 'Short Attachment to Pets Scale' (SAPS) (Muldoon & Williams, 2009;Marsa-Sambola et al, 2016) was incorporated into the 2010 HBSC Scotland study to allow exploration of the nature and impact of pet attachment with a large sample. The SAPS was developed to capture succinctly the overall strength of children and adolescents' attachments to their pets within large scale surveys.…”

Children’s Mental State Talk, Empathy, and Attachments to Companion Animals

“…Our main finding is that compared to boys, girls were more likely to report stronger child-companion animal attachments and received more emotional comfort from their companion animals. Such findings support past studies that show a female advantage in companion animal attachment (Cassels et al, 2017;Marsa-Sambola et al 2016;Muldoon et al, 2019).…”

Childhood Attachment to Pets: Associations between Pet Attachment, Attitudes to Animals, Compassion, and Humane Behaviour

“…In the humane behaviour measure, the sub-scale “aggression towards pets” consisted of only one item and was excluded from analysis, however, we know from previous studies that low attachment to pets is related to cruelty to animals [14]. The SAPS, used to measure pet attachment, was highly reliable within our sample and in those which validated its use [37,39,62] and is a short measure of attachment developed for use in large survey research. It should be noted that it does not cover all aspects of attachment relationships, focusing more on the emotional aspects of pet attachment such as ‘crying with’ (comfort) and feeling lonely without them (separation anxiety) and the friendship aspects of pet attachments, such as playing with and spending time with their pet every day.…”