Measurement of adult attachment: the place of self-report and interview methodologies.

John Bowlby’s (1979) proposal that ‘attachment behavior is held to characterize human beings from the cradle to the grave’ (p. 129) has spawned a large body of research applying principles of attachment theory to adult love relationships. A central and commendable goal of Shaver and Mikulincer’s target article was to provide a means of bridging the conceptual gap between two lines of research within the study of love relationships within adulthood – one using coded narratives to identify adults’ attachment representations with respect to childhood experience and the other using brief self-report instruments to assess adults’ styles of approaching romantic relationships. Shaver and Mikulincer have done an excellent job in elaborating the research on adult romantic attachment. It is notable, however, that they provided few direct comparisons of research Žndings using the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) and the romantic attachment questionnaires. Such comparisons would be important in bridging the areas and in understanding conceptual similarities and differences between these two measures. Thus, the focus of this commentary will be to compare the research Žndings from studies in the two traditions. As discussed below, the two different methodologies may lead to systematic differences in how individuals’ attachment status is classiŽed, speciŽcally with regard to assessment of individuals who in the AAI would be classiŽ ed as secure, preoccupied, dismissing, or unresolved. Such differences indicate that studies using the two methodologies may not be comparing like with like. Thus, we begin by clarifying some of the potentially critical differences in how the two assessment methodologies assess individuals’ attachment status followed by a comparison of Žndings in the two research traditions. To begin, as Shaver and Mikulincer discuss, the AAI assessment of adults’ attachment representations and the self-report assessment of adult romantic attachment styles are both grounded in Bowlby’s (1969, 1973, 1980) theory of attachment. The early versions of these assessments were inspired by Ainsworth and her colleagues’ (1978) landmark discovery of three infant attachment patterns – secure, avoidant and resistant. The AAI and self-report attachment measures differ in the aspects of adults’ representation of relationships that they assess. The AAI classiŽcation system assesses adults’ representation of attachment relationships with respect to particular close relationships, i.e. their relationship with their mother and father during childhood Attachment & Human Development Vol 4 No 2 September 2002 207–215