Publication details
Enhancing Attachment Measurement: Achieving equivalence and Structural Clarity Across Specific Attachment Figures
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Numerous tools to measure attachment in adolescence and adulthood have been developed in the past three decades. However, their dimensionality remains unclear, with the main unanswered question being that of global and specific attachment. One of the most widely used attachment questionnaires, ECR-RS (Fraley, Heffernan, Vicary, & Brumbaugh, 2011), is a valuable method for measuring different aspects of attachment but exhibits several psychometric limitations (Siroňová, Cígler, Ježek, & Lacinová, 2020). Our research is dedicated to developing and validating a questionnaire method that captures the complexity of attachment, with a strong emphasis on psychometric characteristics. The main goal is to create an innovative questionnaire method that fulfills the following criteria: 1) measures attachment to four specific attachment figures (mother, father, romantic partner, best friend); 2) demonstrates a clear factor structure; 3) includes a sufficient number of items for attachment avoidance and anxiety scales; 4) formulates items appropriately for all considered relational contexts; 5) enables the differentiation between specific and global attachment using appropriate analysis. For the pilot study, we assembled an item pool of 269 items designed to measure attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety from existing questionnaires (i.e., ECR-RS, ECR, AASV, ASQ, RSQ). Through content analysis, we reduced the number of items to 13 for attachment avoidance and 14 for attachment anxiety for each attachment figure. The items were translated into Czech. The pilot version of the questionnaire was administered to 600 high school students (aged 12- 19). Participants were asked to respond to items regarding their relationships with their mother, father, best friend, and romantic partner. Currently, we are analyzing the data using structural equation modeling and item response theory. At the International Attachment Conference, we will present the results of our pilot study and the final version of the new attachment questionnaire, along with the analysis of the structure of the relationship between global and specific attachment. |
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