The secure-base phenomenon is central to the Bowlby/Ainsworth theory of attachment
and is also central to the assessment of attachment across the lifespan. The present
study tested whether mothers' knowledge about the secure-base phenomenon,
as assessed using a recently designed wordlist prompt measure for eliciting
attachment-relevant stories, would predict their children's securebase
behavior, as assessed by observers in the home and summarized with the Attachment
Q-set (AQS). In each of three sociocultural groups (from Colombia, Portugal, and the
US), scores characterizing the quality of maternal secure-base narratives elicited
using the word-list prompt procedure were internally consistent, as indicated by
tests of cross-story reliability, and they were positively and significantly
associated with the child's security score from the AQS for each subsample.
The correlation in the combined sample was r(129) = .33, p
< .001. Subsequent analyses with the combined sample evaluated the AQS
item-correlates of the secure-base script score.These analyses showed that mothers
whose stories indicate that they have access to and use a positive secure-base
script in their story production have children who treat them as a “secure
base” at home. These results suggest that a core feature of adult
attachment models, in each of the three sociocultural groups studied, is access to a
secure-base script. Additional results from the study indicate that cross-language
translations of the maternal narratives can receive valid, reliable scores even when
evaluated by non-native speakers.
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