A University of Kansas doctor of psychology has recently finished a study that will be used as a model for future testing in the science of attachment theory, called the State Adult Attachment Measure.
Doctor Omri Gillath, a PhD who recently moved to KU from the University of California at Davis, had been working in conjunction with the University of California at Davis and Lawrence University on the development of a standard method of mapping attachment theory in adults so it could be more easily studied by his colleagues.
“We hope clinicians as well as researcher will be able to use the measure to evaluate changes in state of attachment security due to various treatments,” Gillath said.
Attachment theory, according to R. Chris Fraley, a researcher at the University of Illinois, is the idea that people will exhibit different forms of attachment to people they are close to. The theory was initially explored by John Bowlby in a series of papers he released in the 1950s and 1960s. Bowlby’s idea was that three different types of attachment define how a person acts and responds to people: anxiety attachment, or desiring someone to be close; avoidant attachment, or avoiding people; or secure attachment, or generally being unaffected by the comings and goings of people.
Initially Bowlby believed that people would always conform to these three categories, but research has proven that this is not true. New studies continue to show that at any given time a person can fall in any of the categories, but people tend to stay within their own attachment category. In light of these advances, Gillath and his colleagues began looking for a model that could be used as a standard for research in mapping adult attachment.
The model was based on a 52 questions given to 347 undergraduate students, 54% of whom were in a romantic relationship at the time. The students were instructed to respond to each question with a number one through seven. A rating of one meant disagree strongly and seven meant agree strongly. They were also instructed to only respond as they currently felt. After analyzing the results, the final version of the study is now being published, presented to national conventions, and used in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Gillath has also presented to KU researchers as well.
“I’ve presented the measure to a few of my colleagues from the clinical program here at KU, and these days we’re developing ways they will be able to use the [State Adult Attachment Measure] in their studies,” Gillath said.
Gillath also described what he said was an interesting trend in the data.
“Whereas the distribution for anxiety seems like a normal distribution, the ones for security and avoidance are both skewed, with one mirroring the other,” Gillath said.
Doctor Josh Hart, a PhD who helped with the study from Lawrence University in Wisconsin said that when the study began, all the researchers were much closer together.
“I think we originally expected to complete the project in a year or so, but it has now been several years… All the researchers on the project were at the same university for most of the project,” Hart said.
Hart also said he is excited for the future of the study, but does wish that some further work could have been done on the project.
“I would call it a success, with some qualifications. I wish we had been able to run more studies to validate the measure, and I also wish we could redo some of the steps of scale construction, to see what we would come up with having learned what we have about the process,” Hart said.
