Attachment Representations in School-Age Children: The Development of the Child Attachment Interview (CAI)

Introduction The development of attachment measures began with the assessment of infant behaviour, in the Strange Situation Paradigm. This procedure and the establishment of its validity led to the ‘move to the level of representations’ (Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985), in the assessment of attachment patterns later in development. The greatest achievement here was the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI: George, Kaplan, & Main, 1985; Main, 1995). The measure described in this paper has drawn on both the infant and the adult paradigms and coding strategies, in an effort to produce an assessment of attachment in the middle school years.