Measuring Attachment Representations in Rural and Poor African American Children. The development of the person is considered by many behavioral scientists to involve a dynamic process whereby self-regulatory structures and functions grow from the collaborative interplay between the developing child and the environment. The child and environment are seen from this perspective as mutually transformative over time as earlier patterns of adaptation are transformed by environmental change while environmental features are represented differently by individuals and thus have different meaning and influence. This conceptualization of development is important in guiding research aimed at understanding the child's adaptation to new settings and challenges during key developmental transitions such as the transition to formal schooling. In the transition to school the child encounters new authority figures, standards of performance, and activities and rules in the formal classroom setting, as well as engages in a wide variety of new social interactions with peers and adults. The way in which the child understands and represents the emotion and behaviors of others has been related to children's relationships with their peers and teachers and to broad indicators of school success. Research on this topic highlights the importance of attachment relationships on later functioning, an effect considered by many to be dependent on the child's translation of interaction patterns into relationship representations. Despite the potential importance of these representations, they are rarely studied as part of the adaptation that children make to early schooling and are particularly understudied among children who are at high risk for school failure because of rural, low income, and minority status. One of the barriers to study of this phenomenon is the lack of validation of a measure of attachment representation for rural, low-income, African American children at early school age. In this application we seek support for exploring the Manchester Child Attachment Story Tasks (MCAST) as a valid and reliable measure of attachment representation for rural, low-income African American kindergarten children. We also seek to explore whether attachment representations in rural, low-income African American children serve to mediate the link between maternal care and the child's adaptation to formal schooling. To accomplish this aim, we will use subjects from an ongoing longitudinal study, the Family Life Project (FLP), adding measurement funded by this application to already collected information. This study is ideally suited to explore our questions in a cost-efficient manner. The FLP is a program project in which an epidemiological sample of over 1200 children and their families were enlisted in 6 rural counties in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. We will randomly draw a subsample of 200 North Carolina children from low income, African American families. This sample size gives us good power to explore questions regarding attachment representations using the MCAST.
The current project addresses specific issues related to how children internalize relationships with their primary caregivers and then potentially use those representations to guide how they interact and form new relationships with teachers and peers during the transition to school. These processes may be particularly informative regarding how early familial experience continue to influence socioemotional development and functioning outside of the family environment.
| Gustafsson, Hanna C; Brown, Geoffrey L; Mills-Koonce, W Roger et al. (2017) Intimate Partner Violence and Children's Attachment Representations during Middle Childhood. J Marriage Fam 79:865-878 |
