Adult attachment representations, parental responsiveness, and infant attachment: a meta-analysis on the predictive validity of the Adult Attachment Interview.
About a decade ago, the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; C. George, N. Kaplan, & M. Main, 1985) was developed to explore parents' mental representations of attachment as manifested in language during discourse of childhood experiences. The AAI was intended to predict the quality of the infant-parent attachment relationship, as observed in the Ainsworth Strange Situation, and to predict parents' responsiveness to their infants' attachment signals. The current meta-analysis examined the available evidence with respect to these predictive validity issues. In regard to the 1st issue, the 18 available samples (N = 854) showed a combined effect size of 1.06 in the expected direction for the secure vs. insecure split. For a portion of the studies, the percentage of correspondence between parents' mental representation of attachment and infants' attachment security could be computed (the resulting percentage was 75%; kappa = .49, n = 661). Concerning the 2nd issue, the 10 samples (N = 389) that were retrieved showed a combined effect size of .72 in the expected direction. According to conventional criteria, the effect sizes are large. It was concluded that although the predictive validity of the AAI is a replicated fact, there is only partial knowledge of how attachment representations are transmitted (the transmission gap).
van IJzendoorn
Marinus H
MH
0000-0003-1144-454X
Leiden U, Ctr for Child & Family Studies.
D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007406:Interview, Psychological; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D009769:Object Attachment; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D010290:Parents; D015203:Reproducibility of Results