Woolgar, Matthew Jonathan; (1997) Parental, infant and early childhood attachment classification and its relationship to sociomoral development. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This series of studies reports on the prospective and concurrent relation of attachment to a multimethod examination of moral sense in young children during their sixth year. Attachment theory was developed to explain antisocial behaviours in children with disrupted parenting, and while contemporary attachment research, using validated and reliable instruments, confirms the presence of diverse developmental sequelae to infant-parent attachment, no published studies have investigated Bowlby's initial hypothesis concerning the presumed influence of the attachment relationship upon young children's sociomoral development. The first three chapters review the literature and introduce the instruments to be used. The initial chapter outlines the need for valid and reliable assessments of moral development specifically adapted for young children. The second establishes the theoretical and empirical relevance of the attachment paradigm to investigations of the sociomoral development of young children. Chapter 3 describes the design of the study and the three moral assessment techniques employed in the current research. At the first visit, around the children's fifth birthday, two measures are used: the MacArthur story-stem completion task, a new and as yet unvalidated projective technique specifically designed for assessing young children's representations of sociomoral conflicts, and parental assessments of child problem behaviours with the reliable and validated Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). At a second visit 6 months later, one measure with two parts is presented: an emotion expectation task, concerning the feelings associated with minor transgressions, and a cheating task. Subsequent chapters report the construction of reliable, psychometrically valid scales from these moral assessment techniques, and their associations with the demographic variables from all three phases of the London Parent Child Project, of which this study forms a part. Later chapters present longitudinal and concurrent associations between the scales with categories of child-parent, infant-parent and parental representations of attachment security, controlling and adjusting for the demographic associations. Associations are reported between the attachment variables and the MacArthur and CBCL scales only. Causal models are created to investigate the longitudinal pathways leading to sociomoral development and elaborate the role of attachment security in that development. Attachment variables are involved in the longitudinal prediction of two of the four MacArthur scales and in the cheating task, but are not implicated in the prediction of parental ratings of problem behaviours at 5 years, in this low risk sample. The discussion focuses first upon the enduring relevance of John Bowlby's observations concerning the early emotional climate and the child's subsequent moral internalization and its relation to contemporary empirical research in attachment theory. Secondly, the creation of psychometrically valid scales of young children's sociomoral development, particularly from the narrative responses of MacArthur Story Stem Battery, is discussed concerning their potential application beyond the low-risk, non-clinical sample comprising the LPCP.

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