Mothers’ Attachment Representations and Caregiving Behaviors: A Cross-Cultural Examination

• In Event: Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Bowlby (1982) proposed that mental representations about attachment relationships help individuals interpret relationship-related information, facilitate memory about attachment events, and guide behavior during interactions. Research has shown that parents’ attachment narrative representations are indeed associated with their sensitivity during interactions with their children mostly in Western middle-class dyads (Steele et al., 2014). A more recent conceptualization of attachment representations as secure base scripts (Waters & Waters, 2006) has opened a window to study the content and organization of those representations vis-à-vis caregiving behavior during interactions with children. Questions about the stability of secure base representations, their validity, and cross-cultural generalizability are still being investigated. In this study, we tested (1) the stability of both mothers’ secure base scripts and sensitivity from the time their children were 3.5 years old to the time they were 5-5.5 years old; (2) the associations between maternal secure base scripts and sensitivity at each point in time; and (3) whether the aforementioned associations hold in samples from two different cultures (i.e., Colombian and US).
Seventy-one US mothers completed both assessments at time 1 (T1) and time 2 (T2), when children’s (41 girls) mean age was 44.9 and 64.3 months, respectively. Mothers’ mean age was 34 years, 83% were non-Hispanic Caucasian. In Colombia, sixty-five mothers completed both assessments at T1 and T2 in round 1, when children’s (32 girls) mean age was 43.1 and 59.3 months, respectively. Mother’s mean age was 31 years. The Attachment Script Assessment (Waters & Waters, 2006) was used to assess mothers’ scriptedness of secure base knowledge. In both samples, mothers produced 4 narratives about attachment related themes. The narratives were scored on a 7-point scriptedness scale and the scores were averaged into a secure base script score. Maternal sensitivity was assessed in naturalistic settings (home and park) with The Child Behavior for Preschoolers Q-set (Posada et al., 2007). Raters of maternal narratives and observers of maternal behavior were independent. Reliability indices for both assessments were all > .70.
Descriptive statistics are presented in Table 1. Maternal age and child gender were not significantly associated with any of the key variables. Analyses (Table 2) indicate that (1) maternal sensitivity is stable from time 1 to time 2 in both samples. Maternal secure base scripts were significantly and moderately related from T1 to T2 in the US and Colombian sample as well. (2) The associations between secure base representations and sensitivity at each time point were significant in the US sample; for the Colombian sample, the association was significant only at T2, at T1, the association approached significance. Thus, sensitivity and maternal secure base scripts were relatively stable in both cultures. Further, the association between maternal sensitive behavior and secure base scripts was significant in both cultures when children were 5-5.5 years old, but only in the US earlier when children were 3.5 years of age. Results will be discussed in light of cultural, developmental, and methodological considerations.

Authors

• Geurim Kim, Purdue University, West Lafayette
  Presenting Author

• Muqing Liu, Purdue University, West Lafayette
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jill M Trumbell, University of New Hampshire
  Non-Presenting Author

• Laura Y Anaya, Ounce of Prevention Fund
  Non-Presenting Author

• German E Posada, Purdue University, West Lafayette
  Non-Presenting Author