Adult Attachment Questionnaire
This measure consists of three descriptions of attitudes towards romantic attachments. The descriptions (without the titles) are presented to the subject and they are asked to select the one that they consider to be most typical of themselves.
Essential characteristics of the paragraphs are:
|
Secure |
Trust, friendship, other positive aspects or relationships |
|
Avoidant |
Acute fear of intimacy |
|
Anxious-Ambivalent |
Peoccupation with love and a desire for overinvolvement |
The descriptions used in Hazan & Shaver (1987) were:
|
Secure
I find it relatively easy to get close to others and am comfortable depending on them and having them depend on me. I don't often worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to me. |
|
Avoidant
I am somewhat uncomfortable being close to others; I find it difficult to trust them, difficult to allow myself to depend on them. I am nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, love partners want me to be more intimate than I feel comfortable being. |
|
Anxious/Ambivalent
I find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I often worry that my partner doesn’t really love me or won’t want to stay with me. I want to merge completely with another person, and this desire sometimes scares people away. |
For their next major study, Hazan & Shaver (1990) revised the wordings a little to bring about clearer differentiation between styles and remove the emphasis on romantic relationships.
|
Secure
I find it relatively easy to get close to others and am comfortable depending on them. I don't often worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to me. |
|
Avoidant
I am somewhat uncomfortable being close to others; I find it difficult to trust them completely, difficult to allow myself to depend on them. I am nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, love partners want me to be more intimate than I feel comfortable being. |
|
Anxious/Ambivalent
I find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I often worry that my partner doesn’t really love me or won’t want to stay with me. I want to get very close to my partner, and this sometimes scares people away. |
The following table gives the distribution of subjects across the attachment styles from some of the studies which have used one or the other of Hazan and Shaver's measures.
n/r = not reported
Note that the above figures are provided to give you an idea of the sort of distributions you can expect. There's probably not much mileage in the idea of comparing your distribution with those previously obtained as these categories are basically arbitrary.
In a review of attachment measures, Garbarino (1998) noted that many researchers have reported low or inconsistent reliability scores when using this measure (e.g. Levy & Davis, 1988; Shaver & Brennan, 1992 etc.).
This measure was widely used in early romantic attachment research and convergent validity has been established with such factors as passion, intimacy and commitment (Levy & Davis, 1988), loneliness and relationship duration (Hazan & Shaver, 1987) and relationship satisfaction (Pistole, 1989; Kirkpatrick & Davis, 1994).
Note that some authors (Garbarino, 1998) refer to this as the Attachment Style Measure which can lead to confusion with Simpson's measure of the same name (ASM).
A copy of this measure along with instructions is available on Phillip Shaver's website here and a copy of an original psychometric evaluation of the measure is available here.