The Adolescent Unresolved Attachment Questionnaire: the assessment of perceptions of parental abdication of caregiving behavior.
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.
West
M
M
Department of Psychiatry, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Rose
S
S
Spreng
S
S
Adam
K
K
D000293:Adolescent; D000367:Age Factors; D000416:Alberta; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D000786:Anger; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009769:Object Attachment; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D016487:Parenting; D011581:Psychological Tests; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012737:Sex Factors; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires