Multiple facets of attachment in residential-care, late adopted, and community adolescents: an interview-based comparative study

ABSTRACT

In this study, 117 adolescents (12–19 years) from three groups (39 each), two groups from adverse caregiving environments as placed in residential-care (RC; i.e. istitutions) or late-adopted (LA; i.e. adopted after 12 months), and one of low-risk community adolescents (COM), were compared for the attachment distribution of categories in the Friends and Family Interview (FFI), and in several attachment-related domains where RC and LA showed difficulties during childhood. Only institutionalized adolescents showed more insecure and disorganized categories than both late-adopted and community peers, who did not differ. In the attachment-related domains, only RCs showed lower coherence, reflective functioning, secure-base/safe-haven parents, social and school competence, adaptive response, and more parental anger and derogation than the other two groups. Late-adoptees only showed higher hostility towards sibling(s) than COM.Therefore, only residential-care adolescents were at “high-risk” in attachment, but the analysis of attachment-related domains helped to detect vulnerabilities in both groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescence
• attachment
• adoption
• institutionalized children
• attachment interview

Acknowledgments

We thank all adolescents, caregivers, social services, and high schools who voluntarily collaborated in this study. We also thank the MSc students for helping to collect data, and Simona Di Folco for precious and professional support.

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article [and/or] its supplementary materials.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no potential conflict of interest.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Wallis and Steele (2001) were the first to use an attachment interview in a residential setting with adolescent psychiatric patients and they found that these were mostly classified as disorganized.

2. The individual’s ability to understand the self and others in terms of intentional mental states, like desires, feelings, attitudes and goals (Fonagy & Bateman, 2016).

3. Inclusive of current and previous placements.

4. See Pace et al. (2020b) for a more detailed description of each domain.

5. Small = .01 (1df) or .07(2df), medium = .30 (1df) or .21(2df), large = .50 (1df) or .35 (2df).