the adult attachment interview - support for the continuity hypothesis

Question 1

when and what did mary main investigate?

Answer 1

in 1985, mary main investigated the influence of a person’s childhood attachment to their parents on their future relationships.
main was interested in how the participants childhood attachment effected the attachment style that they had with their own children.

Question 2

what did mary main use to investigate her aim?

Answer 2

the interview technique

Question 3

what happened in main’s study?

Answer 3

• in the interviews, main asked her participants a series of questions about their childhood attachment style and asked them how they thought it influenced their future relationships.
• for instance, participants were asked to used 5 adjectives to describe their relationship with their parents and explain why they had chosen these words
• participants responses were then classified and coded by trained researchers who characterised each of the participants attachment to their parents into one of the 3 attachment styles
• the train researchers then applied the same coding. system to categorise the attachment style that participants had with their own children

Question 4

what did main find?

Answer 4

• the percentage of adults displaying each of the 3 attachment styles was very similar to the percentages first described by mary ainsworth
• ainsworth found that 70% of participants had a secure attachment to their caregiver, 15% had an insecure avoidant attachment to their caregiver and 15% had an insecure resistant attachment to their caregiver.
• percentages were similar in main’s study
• the second result of main’s study was that the participants attachment styles with their parents was strongly correlated with the attachment patterns they had with their own children

Question 5

what did main’s results support?

Answer 5

the continuity hypothesis

Question 6

the adult attachment interview limitation - accuracy

Answer 6

• the participants answers may not have been accurate. particpants were asked to recall events that happened a long time ago in their childhood.
• they may not have been able to recall their interactions with their parents very accurately

Question 7

the adult attachment interview limitation - social desirability bias

Answer 7

• the participants’ answers may not have been objective. they might have been biast.
• their responses may have displayed social desirability bias. for instance, the participants would probably of been unlikely to want to admit if their relationship with their own children wasn’t very good

Question 8

the adult attachment interview limitation - investigator effiects

Answer 8

• it may have suffered from investigator effects.
• the interviewers were likely to have expected the insecurely avoidant to display insecure attachments with their own children.
• this could of accidentally influenced the participants into describing their attachment style as being more or less securely attached