Attachment measures

Attachment measures, or attachment assessments, are procedures used to assess the attachment system in children and adults. These procedures can assess patterns of attachment and individual self-protective strategies. Some assessments work across the several models of attachment and some are model-specific.

Many assessments allow children and adults' attachment strategies to be classified into three primary attachment pattern groups: B-pattern (autonomous, balanced, blended, secure), A-pattern (avoidant, dismissive, cognitive, insecure), and C-pattern (ambivalent, preoccupied, resistant, affective, insecure). In most models, each pattern group is further broken down into several sub-patterns. Some assessments can find additional information about an individual, such as unresolved trauma, depression, history of family triangulation, and lifespan changes in the attachment pattern. Some assessments specifically or additionally look for caregiving behaviors, as caregiving and attachment are considered two separate systems for organizing thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Some methods assess disorders of attachment or romantic attachment.

Attachment models are typically generated from the schools of developmental science or social psychology, although both emanate from the Bowlby-Ainsworth framework. Ainsworth's Strange Situation Procedure was the first formal attachment assessment, and is still in wide use. Each school, while having the same foundation, may be studying different phenomenon.^: 467 Assessments are typically conducted by observing behavior in a structured setting, by analyzing the transcript of a structured interview using technical discourse analysis methods, or by self-reports from a questionnaire. Social psychology models primarily utilize self-reports.

Some attachment models, such as the Berkeley (or ABC+D) model, consider disorganized attachment to be a pattern or category. The D classification was thought to represent a breakdown in the attachment-caregiving partnership such that the child does not have an organized behavioral or representational strategy to achieve protection and care from the attachment figure. However, the disorganized concept has been determined to be invalid for people older than 20 months. Other models, such as the Dynamic-Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation (DMM), describe virtually all attachment behavior and patterns within (or in a combination of) the three primary A, B, C patterns. The DMM considers all attachment behavior to be an organized effort to adapt within a given caregiving environment for optimizing available caregiver protection and maximizing survival.