Measuring attachment security via the Security Scale: Latent structure, invariance across mothers and fathers and convergent validity

Marci, Tatiana; Lionetti, Francesca; Moscardino, Ughetta; Pastore, Massimiliano; Calvo, Vincenzo; Altoè, Gianmarco

doi:10.1080/17405629.2017.1317632

Cited by 10 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…The final version of the items, supervised by an expert in attachment research, revealed to be satisfactory. Consistent with prior works [60], our CFA results provided evidence for the unidimensional structure of the KSS [55]; (CFA results available upon request). The scores were averaged to produce a single score on the continuous dimension, with a higher score reflecting perceptions of greater attachment security.…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 90%

Attachment to mothers and fathers during middle childhood: an evidence from Polish sample

Kamza

2019

BMC Psychol

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BackgroundMiddle childhood is a significant period of change both for a child’s cognition and social functioning. Considering that the primary developmental theme of attachment in middle childhood is the balance between child’s growing autonomy and the constant need of relatedness, cultural differences in developmental trends in the attachment might be considered as a function of individualism and collectivism orientations. However, little is known about whether the findings on predictors of individual differences in the attachment in middle childhood found in Western cultures, hold within the non-Western ones. Moreover, still little is known about differences between attachment to mothers and fathers in middle childhood. Hence, one goal of the present study was to investigate the role of a child’s age, sex, and emotionality in a middle-childhood attachment to mothers and fathers in the Polish sample. The second aim was to compare obtained results to the attachment research that focused on Western cultures.MethodsThe sample consisted of 132 children aged 8–12 years (51% boys). They completed the Kern’s Security Scale and the Coping Strategies Questionnaire. Mothers completed a child’s EAS-C and short sociodemographic questionnaire. Pearson’s correlations were conducted to test relationships between a child’s age, sex, emotionality, SES, and attachment-related variables. A paired-samples t-test was used to compare the intensity of preoccupied and avoidant coping strategies with parents in the whole sample. The effects of a child’s age, sex, temperament, and attachment figure were tested with separate repeated-measures ANOVA.ResultsSome of the results replicated prior studies conducted in Western cultures. Similarly to the individualistic cultures, older Polish children reported less preoccupied and more avoidant coping strategies with their parents than younger children. Second, older girls reported higher felt-security with their fathers than with mothers, which suggests some significant changes in attachment relationships regarding the child’s sex. However, as opposed to Western cultures, there were no links between the child’s sex and preoccupied and avoidant coping. Polish children also reported higher rates of preoccupied coping than the avoidant one. Finally, children with relatively lower emotionality reported higher attachment security with both parents than children with relatively higher emotionality.ConclusionsThe current study extends previous work on attachment in middle childhood, the area of rather sparse research, as compared to other developmental periods. The findings reveal the existence of both some specificity in the middle-child attachment in the Polish sample, as well as some culture-universal developmental trends. However, as many questions remain unanswered, they also highlight the strong need for future cross-cultural and comparative studies.

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Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 90%

Attachment to mothers and fathers during middle childhood: an evidence from Polish sample

Kamza

2019

BMC Psychol

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“…"sure that wouldn't be left", and, "feeling better when parents are around") as presenting significantly different factor loadings for fathers and mothers. Those items seem to better reflect SHS for fathers than for mothers, a finding that is similar to previous studies (see Bacro, 2011;Marci et al, 2018). In addition, results reported in Table 4 suggest that the variance in the SHS and SBS scores for mothers and fathers that can be attributed to the country of origin is trivially small.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

“…We note that these items have been deleted by other researchers when factor analyzing the original 15-item SSQ (e.g. Bacro, 2011;Barcsi et al, 2017;Kerns & Mathews, 2010;Marci et al, 2018). Measures of internal consistency (ordinal Cronbach alphas) were nearly identical for both mothers and fathers across the two subscales.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Measurement invariance across mother/child and father/child attachment relationships

Fernandes

Veríssimo

Santos

et al. 2020

Attachment & Human Development

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We examine the factorial structure of the Security Scale Questionnaire (SSQ), exploring measurement invariance across mother-father-child attachment relationships, child sex, and country. We used the new 21-item SSQ version that integrates both safe haven and secure base behaviors in a two factors structure. Participants were 457 children (224 girls and 233 boys), ranging from 9 to 14 years old (M = 10.84, SD = 1.02) from Portuguese and USA samples. We confirmed the SSQ's two-factor structure, although four items were unrelated to the latent structure and excluded from the final model. Results showed that SSQ can be used to study both mother/child and father/child attachment relationships. Multi-group analyses suggested measurement invariance between boys and girls and between Portuguese and USA samples. Our findings suggest that the SSQ can be considered a valid and cost-effective tool to measure perceived attachment security in middle childhood for both mother/child and father/child relationships. ARTICLE HISTORY

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“…The η index can be easily computed with the R-package (Pastore, 2018), which is freely available from the CRAN repository (https://cran.r-project.org/). The package has been recently used in several publications: (1) to evaluate group invariance in the factorial structure of questionnaires in developmental psychology studies using parameter bootstrap distributions (Lionetti et al, 2018b; Marci et al, 2018); (2) to compute a distance index in anthropological measures (Altoè et al, 2018); and (3) to identify group cut-off scores in personality questionnaires, estimating the intersection points of density distributions (Lionetti et al, 2018a; Pluess et al, 2018). Further studies will be needed to analyze the behavior of the overlap measure in situations where regularity conditions are not met.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Distribution Similarities Between Samples: A Distribution-Free Overlapping Index

2019

Self Cite

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Every day cognitive and experimental researchers attempt to find evidence in support of their hypotheses in terms of statistical differences or similarities among groups. The most typical cases involve quantifying the difference of two samples in terms of their mean values using the t statistic or other measures, such as Cohen's d or U metrics. In both cases the aim is to quantify how large such differences have to be in order to be classified as notable effects. These issues are particularly relevant when dealing with experimental and applied psychological research. However, most of these standard measures require some distributional assumptions to be correctly used, such as symmetry, unimodality, and well-established parametric forms. Although these assumptions guarantee that asymptotic properties for inference are satisfied, they can often limit the validity and interpretability of results. In this article we illustrate the use of a distribution-free overlapping measure as an alternative way to quantify sample differences and assess research hypotheses expressed in terms of Bayesian evidence. The main features and potentials of the overlapping index are illustrated by means of three empirical applications. Results suggest that using this index can considerably improve the interpretability of data analysis results in psychological research, as well as the reliability of conclusions that researchers can draw from their studies.

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Measuring attachment security via the Security Scale: Latent structure, invariance across mothers and fathers and convergent validity

Cited by 10 publications

References 19 publications

Attachment to mothers and fathers during middle childhood: an evidence from Polish sample

Attachment to mothers and fathers during middle childhood: an evidence from Polish sample

Measurement invariance across mother/child and father/child attachment relationships

Measuring Distribution Similarities Between Samples: A Distribution-Free Overlapping Index

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