The quality of maternal secure-base scripts predicts children's secure-base behavior at home in three sociocultural groups

Abstract

The secure-base phenomenon is central to the Bowlby/Ainsworth theory of attachment and is also central to the assessment of attachment across the lifespan. The present study tested whether mothers' knowledge about the secure-base phenomenon, as assessed using a recently designed wordlist prompt measure for eliciting attachment-relevant stories, would predict their children's securebase behavior, as assessed by observers in the home and summarized with the Attachment Q-set (AQS). In each of three sociocultural groups (from Colombia, Portugal, and the US), scores characterizing the quality of maternal secure-base narratives elicited using the word-list prompt procedure were internally consistent, as indicated by tests of cross-story reliability, and they were positively and significantly associated with the child's security score from the AQS for each subsample. The correlation in the combined sample was r(129) = .33, p < .001. Subsequent analyses with the combined sample evaluated the AQS item-correlates of the secure-base script score.These analyses showed that mothers whose stories indicate that they have access to and use a positive secure-base script in their story production have children who treat them as a “secure base” at home. These results suggest that a core feature of adult attachment models, in each of the three sociocultural groups studied, is access to a secure-base script. Additional results from the study indicate that cross-language translations of the maternal narratives can receive valid, reliable scores even when evaluated by non-native speakers.

Secure base representations for both fathers and mothers predict children's secure base behavior in a sample of Portuguese families

“…In terms of the psychometric properties of the total and subscores (i.e., parent-child, adult-adult) for secure base scriptedness, fathers in this sample created stories that yielded reliability (Cronbach's alpha) estimates that were comparable to those of mothers in this sample and from other studies (e.g., Vaughn et al, 2007). Alphas for the father data were also in the same range as for adult males reported by Elliott et al (2003).…”

“…Because no data for the Attachment Script Representation (Waters & RodriguesDoolabh, 2004) have been published to date for fathers, our data served as an opportunity to explore the psychometric attributes of this measure with a sample of fathers and to examine whether the instrument is used by fathers in the same manner that we have found it used by mothers (e.g., Vaughn et al, 2007;Verı´ssimo & Salvaterra, 2006). The data also afford the opportunity to consider previously reported findings regarding similarities of child attachment assessments across parents (i.e., Steele et al, 1996).…”

“…The remaining two stories are not relevant to the secure base script and are not scored for secure base content. Prior research with Portuguese samples (Vaughn et al, 2007;Verı´ssimo, Monteiro, Vaughn, Santos, & Waters, 2005) suggests that this task is a reliable and valid indicator of adult secure base knowledge for Portuguese mothers.…”

“…The final score is the average scriptedness score across four stories intended to prime the secure base script. This task and scoring protocol yields highly reliable scores for mothers across a range of socio-cultural groups (e.g., Vaughn et al, 2007;Waters et al, under review). A modified version of the word-prompt list task also has been shown to yield reliable scores in a sample of female and male adolescents (Dykas, Woodhouse, Cassidy, & Waters, 2006).…”

“…Validity data for the scriptedness scores include significant correlations with the coherence scale from the AAI (e.g., Coppola, Vaughn, Cassibba, & Costantini, 2006;Waters & Rodrigues-Doolabh, 2001), significant associations with classifications from the AAI in an adolescent sample (Dykas et al, 2006), correspondence between maternal secure base script scores and infant Strange Situation classifications (e.g., Tini, Corcoran, Rodrigues-Doolabh, & Waters, 2003), and significant correlations between the scriptedness scores for mothers and Attachment Q-sort security scores (Vaughn et al, 2007;Verı´ssimo & Salvaterra, 2006). In a study of associations among attachment variables and mother-child reminiscences concerning emotionally charged events in the child's life, Bost et al (2006) found that the mother's scriptedness score was positively associated with child participation and with the use of emotion words by both mother and child.…”