New methods—more questions: A commentary on interdisciplinary dialogues

Steele, Steele, and Murphy describe the relevance of the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) for psychotherapy research. Although the authors focus more specifically on this one measure of adult attachment style, the issues they raise hold a more general relevance for the evaluation of both attachment patterns and reflective functioning during psychotherapy. Undoubtedly, many clinicians and researchers believe that these overlapping constructs are important for the practice of psychotherapy in general and psychotherapy research in particular. Steele et al. focus their article on addressing three key issues. They first describe two main streams of research related to attachment representation and organization. The first stream arises from the developmental psychology literature and the other from social psychology. Also of note, use of the AAI originated primarily from researchers interested in longitudinal research, whereas self-report measures have more often been used in cross-sectional designs. Unfortunately, these two different methods of assessing attachment patterns do not converge. The fact that self-report measures of attachment were often developed to assess the quality of romantic relationships, whereas the AAI was developed to assess how adults conceptualize their relational world (including their childhood), could be responsible for this notable lack of convergence (e.g., Shaver, & Fraley, 2004). Another difference is that self-report attachment measures ask participants to generalize their style from many situations and sometimes from many relationships. In contrast, AAI interviewers inquire into specific relationships with specific people (mostly focusing on the relationship with mother and father). Of course, one could ask the respondents to complete the self-report questionnaire for different people or relationships. Using a self-report version of the core conflictual relationship theme (CCRT), McCarthy, Gibbons, and Barber (2008) used this very approach to get a better assessment of the respondent core conflict. However, the convergence between the repeated administrations of the selfreport measure of core conflicts and the expert judge ratings obtained via the clinical method has not yet been examined. A second issue the authors address is the history of how the AAI emerged out of Bowlby’s work on unresolved mourning in the field of developmental psychology and, specifically, the ways in which these experiences color the individual’s attachment patterns (and subsequent relationships). AAI interviews result in the interviewee being given a classification of ‘‘(1) secure, (2) insecure-dismissing, (3) insecurepreoccupied, or (4) unresolved with respect to past loss or trauma. ’’ These styles are clearly traced to the parenting behavior of the participants’ caregivers, and these styles have been shown to be stable over time. As part of their covering of the AAI’s history, Steele et al. also describe some of its psychometric properties. Good interjudge reliability is obtained by certified raters who have taken a 2-week AAI institute training course and passed the subsequent test of interrater reliability on 30 interviews. Finding appropriate interrater reliability when rating the