Method
Two instruments, one word
Two research traditions report results under the heading of adult attachment. They developed in different places, use different procedures, and were built to answer different questions. Reading either literature without knowing which instrument produced a given number leads to confusion that the shared vocabulary conceals rather than resolves.
The interview
The Adult Attachment Interview was developed by Carol George, Nancy Kaplan and Mary Main in the mid-1980s. It is a semi-structured interview about childhood relationships with caregivers, transcribed verbatim and then coded by a trained rater. The coding is the unusual part. Raters are not scoring what the speaker reports having experienced; they are scoring properties of the discourse itself — whether the account is internally consistent, whether claims are supported by the episodes offered in evidence, whether the speaker stays on topic and maintains a coherent narrative when asked difficult questions. Classifications include secure-autonomous, dismissing, preoccupied, and unresolved.
The procedure is expensive. Interviews must be conducted, transcribed and coded by raters who have completed a training programme and passed a reliability check. Sample sizes in interview-based studies are correspondingly small, which constrains the precision of any estimate drawn from them.
The questionnaire
The self-report tradition, described in the accompanying article on measurement, asks respondents to rate statements about closeness and dependence in romantic relationships, and returns scores on dimensions of anxiety and avoidance. Administration takes minutes and costs almost nothing, which is why sample sizes in this literature are large and why most of what circulates in general-audience writing originates here.
The two procedures differ on almost every axis that matters. One targets discourse about childhood caregiving; the other targets current functioning in romantic relationships. One is coded by a third party; the other is scored from the respondent's own ratings. One yields categories assigned by a rater; the other yields continuous scores.
The comparison
Whether the two instruments converge is a question that can be settled empirically, and Glenn Roisman and colleagues put it to that test. In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2007, Roisman, Holland, Fortuna, Fraley, Clausell and Clarke administered both types of measure to the same participants and examined the association. The overlap they reported was small — small enough that treating a result from one tradition as evidence about the other is not defensible on the numbers.
That finding has an editorial consequence. A statement such as "attachment in adulthood is associated with X" is incomplete until the instrument is named, because the two literatures are not reporting on the same measured quantity even though they share a term.
An unresolved gap
The interview tradition carries its own open problem. Attachment theory predicts that a caregiver's state of mind should relate to the infant's classification, and meta-analytic work has examined how much of that link the theory's proposed mechanism accounts for. Marije Verhage and colleagues, in a 2016 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin, reported that a substantial portion of the association remains unexplained by the mechanisms proposed to carry it — the gap that specialists in this area refer to as the transmission gap. It has been described in the literature for roughly three decades and has not closed.
Neither instrument is discredited by any of this. Both are used in current work and both generate results. The point is narrower and more practical: the word attachment is doing double duty, and a reader tracking a claim back to its source needs to know which procedure produced it before deciding what the claim covers.
Sources
- George, C., Kaplan, N., & Main, M. (1985, and later revisions). Adult Attachment Interview protocol.
- Main, M., & Goldwyn, R. Adult attachment scoring and classification system.
- Roisman, G. I., Holland, A., Fortuna, K., Fraley, R. C., Clausell, E., & Clarke, A. (2007). The Adult Attachment Interview and self-reports of attachment style. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Verhage, M. L., et al. (2016). Narrowing the transmission gap: a synthesis of three decades of research on intergenerational transmission of attachment. Psychological Bulletin.
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