Validity of the School-age Assessment of Attachment for moderate-risk, rural early adolescents

CCPP's contribution to the maturing of the DMM

Over a decade, CCPP published many articles, a special issue and two special sections that enabled the DMM to become established as an alternative to both attachment disorganization and psychiatric diagnoses. New clinical authors from many countries contributed to an empirical set of assessment validity studies and findings regarding troubled and highrisk children and families. The outcome was a validated life-span series of assessments of attachment, a coherent body of important clinical findings, especially regarding school-aged children, and family functional formulations as laying the basis for DMM Integrative Treatment.

Assessing attachment in school-aged children: Do the School-Age Assessment of Attachment and Family Drawings work together as complementary tools?

AIMS

Our goal was to identify an assessment package that could improve treatment planning for troubled children and their families. To assess the validity of our tools, we tested the relations among the School-Age Assessment of Attachment, the Family Drawing and children's risk status. We used the Dynamic-Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation to interpret the assessments in the hope of identifying a gradient of risk, and explore whether a new coding method improved the validity of Family Drawings and their utility as a tool to complement the School-Age Assessment of Attachment.

METHOD

The participants were 89 children, aged between 5 and 12 years; 32 children were involved with mental health services or child protection. Each child completed a School-Age Assessment of Attachment and a Family Drawing.

RESULTS

Both assessments differentiated between clinical and normative referrals with moderate effect sizes when dichotomizing risk versus non-risk attachment. When the analysis incorporated a gradient of six attachment classifications, the effect sizes decreased, but specificity of risk increased.

CONCLUSIONS

The School-Age Assessment of Attachment had greater validity for discriminating risk, and type of risk, than the Family Drawings. With a School-Age Assessment of Attachment and family history, the Family Drawing can provide information about distress that some children do not provide verbally. Integration of the two assessment tools alongside information about parental and family functioning appears to be the key to formulating children's problems.