Assessing and quantifying the secure base script from narratives produced by preschool age children: justification and validation tests

ABSTRACT

Building on aframework presented by Bretherton and associates, Waters and associates argued that interaction sequences relevant to children’s access to and use of asecure base for exploration during infancy/toddlerhood become internalized as script-like representations. For adults, these scripted representations are readily assessed using word-prompt lists d to elicit attachment relevant narratives. However, this method is not appropriate during early childhood. Waters and associates used stories from Bretherton’s Attachment Story Completion Task for this purpose. However, the method they used to score secure base script use is not efficient for larger samples (e.g. over 50), and new approaches for scoring have been designed. We describe two approaches to story selection and scoring for access to and use of the secure base script. The two scoring methods show substantial and significant overlap and also have significant associations with other methods of measuring attachment security during early childhood.

KEYWORDS:

• Attachment representations
• secure base script
• social competence
• adaptation
• preschool-age children

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Lisa Krzysik and London Nix for their assistance and support of the data collection for USA Sample 2.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been supported in part by National Science Foundation grant BCS-0645530, NIFA HATCH project INDO30642, the Kinley Trust, and the Purdue Research Foundation (USA Sample 1), National Science Foundation grants BCS 1251322, BCS 1651189, National Institute of Food and Agriculture Hatch project ALA042-1-14021 (USA Sample 2), and by FCT-PTDC/MHC-PED/0838/2014.