The Adult Attachment Interview and self-reports of attachment style: An empirical rapprochement
Roisman and colleagues addressed a problem that had been quietly undermining the attachment literature: two different measures both called attachment, one a lengthy developmental interview about a person's childhood, the other a self-report questionnaire about how they relate to partners, and no clear evidence they measure the same thing. Across a meta-analysis of the existing studies and two new ones, the answer is that they barely overlap at all. The association between security assessed by interview and security assessed by questionnaire is trivially small. Their third study, with fifty engaged couples, shows why this matters practically: the two measures predict different, though theoretically sensible, aspects of how adult relationships function. The honest conclusion is that the developmental and social-psychological traditions have been studying related but distinct things under one name. This vault cites it whenever a claim moves between the two literatures as though they were interchangeable.
Roisman and colleagues addressed a problem that had been quietly undermining the attachment literature: two different measures both called attachment, one a lengthy developmental interview about a person's childhood, the other a self-report questionnaire about how they relate to partners, and no clear evidence they measure the same thing. Across a meta-analysis of the existing studies and two new ones, the answer is that they barely overlap at all. The association between security assessed by interview and security assessed by questionnaire is trivially small. Their third study, with fifty engaged couples, shows why this matters practically: the two measures predict different, though theoretically sensible, aspects of how adult relationships function. The honest conclusion is that the developmental and social-psychological traditions have been studying related but distinct things under one name. This vault cites it whenever a claim moves between the two literatures as though they were interchangeable.
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Roisman, G. I., Holland, A., Fortuna, K., Fraley, R. C., Clausell, E., & Clarke, A. (2007). 'The Adult Attachment Interview and self-reports of attachment style: an empirical rapprochement.' Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(4), 678-697. Study 1 meta-analysis, combined N = 961: mean r = .09, range .02 to .17, described by the authors as trivial to small. Study 2, N = 160, same result. The only non-trivial thread was self-reported avoidance with dismissing states of mind, r = .15.
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The source
https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.4.678
DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.92.4.678