The Adolescent Unresolved Attachment Questionnaire: The Assessment of Perceptions of Parental Abdication of Caregiving Behavior

Abstract

This article reports on the Adolescent Unresolved Attachment Questionnaire (AUAQ), a brief questionnaire that assesses the caregiving experiences of unresolved adolescents (as recipients of caregiving). The AUAQ was developed and validated in a large normative sample (n = 691) and a sample of 133 adolescents in psychiatric treatment. It is a self-report questionnaire consisting of 3 scales with Likert-type responses ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The Aloneness/Failed Protection Scale assesses the adolescent's perception of the care provided by the attachment figure. The Fear Scale taps the fear generated by the adolescent's appraisal of failed attachment figure care. The Anger/Dysregulation Scale assesses negative affective responses to the perceived lack of care from the attachment figure. All scales demonstrated satisfactory internal reliability and agreement between scores for adolescents (n = 91) from the normative sample who completed the AUAQ twice. Adolescents in the clinical sample also completed the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; C. George, N. Kaplan, & M. Main, 1984/1985/1996); the AUAQ demonstrated high convergent validity with the AAI.

The Self-Report Assessment of Adolescent Attachment: A Systematic Review and Critique

“…Several of these were developed for specific purposes; for example, the Adolescent Unresolved Attachment Questionnaire (West, Rose, Spreng, & Adam, 2000), and two were specific secure base measures. Two of the citations refer to unpublished scales.…”

Shifts in Attachment Relationships: A Study of Adolescents in Wilderness Treatment

“…The Dysregulation Scale measures the negative affect which is connected to the perceived lack of care from the caregiver. The AUAQ has shown to have satisfactory internal consistency for each subscale (Failed Protection a = .71, Fear a = .66, Dysregulation a = .73), demonstrates temporal stability as well as good convergent construct validity with other psychometrically strong attachment measures (West et al 2000). Subscale and total scores are computed by reverse scoring the positively worded questions then adding up each group of subscale questions, as well as all questions to get subscale and total scores.…”

“…The Adolescent Unresolved Attachment Questionnaire (AUAQ: West et al 2000) is a tenitem self-report, Likert-type questionnaire with responses of strongly disagree to strongly agree consisting of three scales. The Failed Protection Scale measures the adolescent's perception of care provided by the caregiver.…”

Adolescent attachment in Nepal: Testing the factorial validity of two scales

“…This consists of 3 subscales: Angry Distress (amount of anger in the caregiving relationship), Availability (confidence in caregiver's emotional availability), and Goal-Directed Partnership (adolescent's reciprocity and empathy towards the caregiver). The questionnaire has 9 items in total, 3 in each subscale; scores range from 9 to 45. b. Adolescent Unresolved Attachment Questionnaire (AUAQ; West et al, 2000). This measures 3 dimensions of unresolved attachment (Solomon & George, 2011) using 10 items: Failed Protection/ Aloneness (perceived quality of care; 4 items), Fear (fear due to perceived failed care; 3 items), and Anger/Dysregulation (negative affective response to perceived failed care; 3 items).…”

“…The Adolescent Attachment Questionnaire (West, Rose, Spreng, Sheldon-Keller, & Adam, 1998) and the Adolescent Unresolved Attachment Questionnaire (West, Rose, Spreng, & Adam, 2000) are two important scales assessing quality of attachment in adolescence. These scales have been validated against the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), a measure considered by many to be the gold standard in assessing adult and adolescent attachment (Hesse, 2008).…”