Development and Validation of Attachment Scale for Children (ASC)

Description

Page: 279-289

Sithara Ashref, K. and Annalakshmi, N. (Department of Psychology, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu)

The attachment concept has been extensively explored since John Bowlby’s substantial work on infant and caregiver relationships. It refers to a lasting psychological bond between human beings that begins right from infancy, where the child is believed to possess an innate connectedness towards the parent or primary caregiver. Though there exists a number of attachment scales that are meant to analyze the bond between the child and the parent, an attachment scale culturally and contextually relevant for Indian children needs to be developed. The present study aims to develop and validate a new attachment scale for children with separate sections related to mother attachment and father attachment. The steps involved in the development of the scale include item generation, content validation, reliability analysis, and construct validation. The initial item pool consisted of 218 items with two sections, one for mother attachment scale and another for father attachment scale, containing 109 items each and tapping four attachment patterns. After necessary modifications, a 5-point Likert scale was administered to a sample of 320 children (156 male & 164 female) aged between 10 and 14 years. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) identified a two-factor structure for each section of the scale, i.e., the mother and father attachment scales. Factors jointly accounted for 59.77% variance for the mother attachment scale and 67.60% variance for the father attachment scale. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) confirmed the model as a good fit. The Cronbach’s alpha of the 21-item mother attachment scale was 0.90, and 0.91 and 0.98 for Secure and Insecure scales, respectively. The Cronbach’s alpha of the 35-item father attachment scale was found to be 0.80, and 0.97 and 0.98 for Secure and Insecure scales, respectively. Apart from high internal consistency, the scale demonstrated good construct validity, viz., convergent and discriminant validity. This way, an Attachment Scale for Children (ASC) has been developed with good psychometric qualities for identifying children’s attachment patterns towards their mother and father.