Validity of the School-age Assessment of Attachment for moderate-risk, rural early adolescents

School-aged children who present for psychotherapy are often very perplexing. Their symptoms are clear and concerning, but the reasons for the symptoms are obscure. The parents describe the progress of the symptoms, but usually have little understanding of the process that resulted in problems. The children are even less informative and, when the symptoms are quite severe, children's communication may become almost inscrutable. Nevertheless, astute clinicians have often felt the children had a coherent story to tell if we just knew how to listen. The papers presented in this Special Section of Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry (CCPP) describe the process and outcomes of a series of studies exploring the reliability, validity, and utility of the School-aged Assessment of Attachment (SAA). The SAA uses children's narratives about threats that school-aged children fear (and sometimes experience) and the self-protective attachment strategies that they organize to protect and comfort themselves. Clinicians need an assessment that discriminates within the group of risk children and does so by adding to what is already known (as opposed to corroborating the known risk/non-risk status of the child). Furthermore, the new information must have implications for more precise treatment than would have been offered without the assessment. This is the issue of utility. Researchers need an assessment with construct validity (as opposed to the face validity of calling it "attachment") and reliability among coders. Children need an assessment that engages them in ways that are suitable for their age and development, and that addresses their concerns. However, the two best validated assessments of attachment (the Ainsworth Strange Situation and George/Main Adult Attachment Interview) are inappropriate for school-aged children. Short separations do not elicit attachment strategies in school-aged children and Adult Attachment Interview (AAI)-style questions, aimed at integrating early and current events with their implications for the self in the present, are beyond children's maturational capacity. Although a number of approaches have been offered for the school years, none has yet achieved wide acceptance, nor has any been validated sufficiently to justify such acceptance. Constructing a developmentally attuned and clinically informative assessment Attachment and school-aged children's development In infancy, attachment is person-specific, that is, the attachment between an infant and a specific parent. By adulthood, attachment can be integrated to a generalized pattern that adults use in many 588650C CP0010.

“…Shari Kidwell and her colleagues replicated and extended the PAA-to-SAA relation from 4 to 11 years (Kidwell et al, this issue).…”

Section: Validating the Saamentioning

confidence: 93%

Understanding children: Assessing school-aged children’s self-protective attachment strategies

Crittenden

2015

“…• • Later-born siblings in risk families used the opposite A or C strategy from their older sibling or more complex A/C strategies (Kozlowska & Elliott, 2016). • • In middle childhood, children's protective attachment strategies were stable across 6 months (Crittenden et al, 2015) to 8 years (Kidwell et al, 2015), even in risk families.…”

Section: B the Studies By Dmm Researchers Produced Many Clinically Rmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…In middle childhood, children’s protective attachment strategies were stable across 6 months (Crittenden et al, 2015) to 8 years (Kidwell et al, 2015), even in risk families.…”

Section: B the Studies By Dmm Researchers Produced Many Clinically Rmentioning

confidence: 99%

CCPP’s contribution to the maturing of the DMM

Crittenden

2020

Over a decade, CCPP published many articles, a special issue and two special sections that enabled the DMM to become established as an alternative to both attachment disorganization and psychiatric diagnoses. New clinical authors from many countries contributed to an empirical set of assessment validity studies and findings regarding troubled and highrisk children and families. The outcome was a validated life-span series of assessments of attachment, a coherent body of important clinical findings, especially regarding school-aged children, and family functional formulations as laying the basis for DMM Integrative Treatment.

“…Because the Preschool Assessment of Attachment (PAA, Spieker & Crittenden, 2009) is well validated, children's attachment strategies on the PAA were compared with their strategies on the SAA. In two longitudinal studies, there was high concordance between the PAA and SAA classifications (Crittenden et al, 2015;Kidwell et al, 2015). In a study of concordant validity, parents of children being assessed for psychiatric diagnosis were found to warrant psychiatric diagnoses themselves, often several co-morbid diagnoses (Crittenden et al, 2010).…”

Section: Validity Of the Saamentioning

confidence: 98%

“…In a study of concordant validity, parents of children being assessed for psychiatric diagnosis were found to warrant psychiatric diagnoses themselves, often several co-morbid diagnoses (Crittenden et al, 2010). Similarly, children whose mothers had experienced child sexual abuse (Kwako et al, 2010) or whose parents had been exposed to childhood adversity (Kidwell et al, 2015) were found to use risk attachment strategies. Likewise, the siblings of children under child protection supervision experienced equally detrimental, albeit often different, outcomes as their referred siblings (Jean-Gilles & Crittenden, 1990).…”

Section: Validity Of the Saamentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing attachment in school-aged children: Do the School-Age Assessment of Attachment and Family Drawings work together as complementary tools?

Carr-Hopkins¹,

Burca²,

Aldridge

2017

The School-Age Assessment of Attachment had greater validity for discriminating risk, and type of risk, than the Family Drawings. With a School-Age Assessment of Attachment and family history, the Family Drawing can provide information about distress that some children do not provide verbally. Integration of the two assessment tools alongside information about parental and family functioning appears to be the key to formulating children's problems.