Name and Type of Measure
Adult Attachment Interview (AAI).
Introduction
The AAI is a semistructured interview and scoring system developed to assess adult- and adolescent-attachment based on congruence between semantic and episodic memories. To illustrate, the semantic descriptor “loving” about an interviewee’s childhood relationship with his mother is incongruent with the episodic memory of being punished for failing to take out the trash, but is congruent with the memory of being surprised that she comforted the interviewee for failing a history exam.
The AAI contains 18 questions that probe autobiographical childhood memories, descriptions of relationships with primary caregivers, and experiences of loss and trauma. Trained coders analyze responses for coherence of discourse, comprised of natural conversational maxims, including veracity, concision, relevance, and order (Grice 1975), resulting in assignment on one of the continuous rating scales of attachment:
Secure-Autonomous (F)....
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
References
Ammaniti, M., Speranza, A. M., & Candelori, C. (1996). Stability of attachment in hildren and intergenerational transmission of attachment. Psychiatria dell-Infanzia e dell-Adolscenza, 63, 313–332.
Bakermans-Kranenburg, M.J., & Van IJzendoorn, M.H. (1993). A psychometric study of the Adult Attachment Interview: Reliability and discriminant validity. Developmental Psychology, 29(5), 870–879.
Crowell, J.A., Waters, E., Treboux, D., O’Connor, E., Colon-Downs, C., Feider, O., Golby, B., & Posada, G. (1996). Discriminant validity of the Adult Attachment Interview. Child Development, 67, 2584–2599.
George, C., Kaplan, N., & Main, M. (1984). Adult Attachment Interview protocol. Unpublished manuscript, University of California at Berkeley.
Grice, P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics. 3: Speech acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic.
Hesse, E. (2008). The adult attachment interview: Protocol, method of analysis, and empirical studies. In J. Cassidy & P. R. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications (2nd ed., pp. 552–598). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Steele, H., & Steele, M. (Eds.). (2008). Clinical applications of the Adult Attachment Interview. New York: The Guilford Press.
van IJzendoorn, M.H., & Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. (1993). A psychometric study of the Adult Attachment Interview: Reliability and discriminant validity. Developmental Psychology, 29, 870–879.
van IJzendoorn, M. H., & Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. (1996). Attachment representations in mothers, fathers, adolescents and clinical groups: A meta-analytic search for normative data. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64, 8–21.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Fisher, M. (2017). Adult Attachment Interview. In: Lebow, J., Chambers, A., Breunlin, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15877-8_680-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15877-8_680-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-15877-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-15877-8
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Behavioral Science and PsychologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences