The Attachment Strengths and Needs Interview for parents of children with severe or profound intellectual disabilities: An acceptability and feasibility study

ABSTRACT

Background

The feasibility and acceptability was explored of the newly-constructed Attachment Strengths and Needs Interview for parents of children with severe or profound intellectual disabilities.

Method

A partially mixed methods approach (with focus on the quantitative data) was used to clarify parents’ and professionals’ viewpoints regarding the acceptability of the interview through websurvey-ratings.

Results

Parents generally felt appreciated during or after the interview, were motivated to work on the proposed goals and felt the interview covered their actual needs, but were, however, more neutral on the aspects of reflection and learning. Professionals indicated that the interview gathered sufficient information on most elements of interest at the start of an intervention trajectory, but generally missed information on the origins of parents’ questions and the families’ expectations towards taking part in an intervention.

Conclusions

The current study showed preliminary support for the feasibility and acceptability of the Attachment Strengths and Needs Interview, as part of a broader intake procedure, to inform attachment-focused interventions for parents of children with disabilities by identifying their strengths and needs.

KEYWORDS:

• Attachment
• interview
• feasibility
• acceptability
• intellectual disability
• children

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all care organisations for selecting and motivating families to participate and to parents who welcomed us in their home to share their personal experiences. Furthermore, we thank Gilles Droogmans (Orcid ID: 0000-0002-8345-7123), who helped us with data collection as one of the interviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the article of Bowen et al. (2009), the terminology “feasibility study” is used as an umbrella term, under which various areas of focus can be implied. In the current feasibility study, acceptability was the main area of focus, but not exclusively. Therefore, the study was named an acceptability and feasibility study, as is common in related scientific literature.

2 This age criterion was set because of the embeddedness of the current study in a larger project.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [grant number 1174917N].