Longitudinal
What stability looks like when it is measured over decades
Asking whether adult attachment is stable sounds like a single question. In practice it is three: how strongly do scores at one point in time predict scores at a later point, what shape does that association take as the interval lengthens, and how much of the apparent change is movement in the underlying quantity rather than noise in the measure.
Two models, one prediction each
R. Chris Fraley set out the competing accounts in a 2002 review in Personality and Social Psychology Review, alongside a meta-analysis of the test-retest data available at the time. The revisionist model holds that early representations are progressively overwritten by later experience; on that account, the correlation between two measurements should keep decaying as the gap between them grows, approaching zero over a long enough interval. The prototype model holds that an early representation persists alongside later ones and continues to exert influence; on that account, the correlation should decline at first and then level off at a non-zero value.
The meta-analytic pattern was closer to the second shape. Observed test-retest correlations were moderate at short intervals, declined as intervals lengthened, and flattened rather than continuing toward zero. That is evidence about the form of the association, not a measurement of how much any individual changes, and the review is explicit on the distinction.
Error looks like instability
Any observed correlation between two administrations of a scale is attenuated by measurement error in both. A questionnaire with imperfect reliability will show less apparent stability than the quantity it measures actually has. Analyses that model the construct as a latent variable and separate it from occasion-specific error return higher stability estimates than the raw correlations do. Reports that quote a raw test-retest figure without noting this are quoting a floor rather than an estimate.
A second complication concerns what the measure is aggregating. Fraley, Vicary, Brumbaugh and Roisman, writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2011, examined attachment measured with respect to specific named relationships rather than in general. Scores varied meaningfully across a person's different relationships. A global score, on that evidence, functions as a summary across relationship-specific patterns, and a change in a global score can reflect a change in which relationships are salient rather than a change in a general disposition.
Age differences and what confounds them
Cross-sectional comparisons across age groups generally find lower reported anxiety and lower reported avoidance among older respondents. William Chopik, Robin Edelstein and Kevin Grimm addressed the interpretation problem in a 2019 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, using longitudinal data to separate change within individuals from differences between birth cohorts. The distinction is not academic: a cross-sectional age gradient is consistent with people changing as they age and equally consistent with cohorts differing from the outset, and the two carry entirely different implications.
Long panels carry their own selection problem. Attrition over decades is not random with respect to the variables under study, and participants who remain in a study for thirty years differ in known and unknown ways from those who leave. Estimates from surviving panel members are estimates for that subgroup.
What the word stability refers to
Across this literature, stability is a property of a particular measure, over a particular interval, in a particular sample. It is not a property attributed to individuals, and the studies do not license statements about how much any given person changes or remains the same. The reported findings describe distributions of scores in research samples, and that is the level at which they can be read.
Sources
- Chopik, W. J., Edelstein, R. S., & Grimm, K. J. (2019). Longitudinal changes in attachment orientation over a 59-year period. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Fraley, R. C. (2002). Attachment stability from infancy to adulthood: meta-analysis and dynamic modeling of developmental mechanisms. Personality and Social Psychology Review.
- Fraley, R. C., Vicary, A. M., Brumbaugh, C. C., & Roisman, G. I. (2011). Patterns of stability in adult attachment: an empirical test of two models of continuity and change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
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