Adapting Doll Completion Story Task to Adults in the Assessment of Secure Base Scripts A Preliminary Study of Reliability and Validity

Secure base scripts constitute an approach providing reliable and valid measures of mental representations of attachment. Doll Completion Story Task (DCST) is a common measure in literature, tapping into attachment-related secure base scripts in children. The purpose of the current research was to conduct a preliminary reliability and validity study of Adult-DCST. In the development phase, the protocol was applied to 40 healthy adults and 20 psychiatric inpatients, and “Adult-DCST Application and Scoring Manual” was formed according to the content examinations of Adult-DCST. Following, 20 participants were randomly selected from 60 participant-pool of Adult-DCST applications. Inter-rater reliability and validity examinations were conducted among randomly-selected 20 participants (nhealthy = 9; npsychiatricinnpatient = 11). Participants with the mean age of 22.15 filled out Relationship Scales Questionnaire (RSQ), Experiences in Close Relationships-R (ECR-R), and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES). Results indicated that inter-rater agreement for Reflective Functioning, Attachment, Anxiety and Avoidance dimensions of Adult-DCST were .83, .89, .79, and .83, respectively. Cronbach alpha internal consistency coefficients of mentioned dimensions ranged between .79 and .85. Also, there were significant relationships between Adult-DCST dimensions and sub-scales of RSQ and ECR-R, and total scores of RSES in the expected directions. Findings suggested that Adult-DCST was a reliable measure of secure base scripts. Keywords Secure base scripts, adults, doll completion story, attachment represantations

The quality of maternal secure-base scripts predicts children's secure-base behavior at home in three sociocultural groups

The secure-base phenomenon is central to the Bowlby/Ainsworth theory of attachment and is also central to the assessment of attachment across the lifespan. The present study tested whether mothers' knowledge about the secure-base phenomenon, as assessed using a recently designed wordlist prompt measure for eliciting attachment-relevant stories, would predict their children's securebase behavior, as assessed by observers in the home and summarized with the Attachment Q-set (AQS). In each of three sociocultural groups (from Colombia, Portugal, and the US), scores characterizing the quality of maternal secure-base narratives elicited using the word-list prompt procedure were internally consistent, as indicated by tests of cross-story reliability, and they were positively and significantly associated with the child's security score from the AQS for each subsample. The correlation in the combined sample was r(129) = .33, p < .001. Subsequent analyses with the combined sample evaluated the AQS item-correlates of the secure-base script score.These analyses showed that mothers whose stories indicate that they have access to and use a positive secure-base script in their story production have children who treat them as a “secure base” at home. These results suggest that a core feature of adult attachment models, in each of the three sociocultural groups studied, is access to a secure-base script. Additional results from the study indicate that cross-language translations of the maternal narratives can receive valid, reliable scores even when evaluated by non-native speakers.