Parental attachment styles of late adolescents: Qualities of attachment relationships and consequences for adjustment.

Abstract

Lack of a self-report measure of late adolescent parental attachment style has threatened to hinder expansion of the empirical basis of attachment theory. Two studies were undertaken that provided evidence of validity for a new classification of parental attachment style from patterns of scores on the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (G. C. Armsden & M. T. Greenberg, 1987). Discriminant function analyses differentiated among secure, ambivalent, and avoidant attachment with 2 empirically derived dimensions, which paralleled the essential attachment functions theorized by M. D. S. Ainsworth (1989). Overall, insecurely attached late adolescents reported greater depression, anxiety, and worry than their securely attached counterparts. For women but not for men, insecure attachment was associated with diminished college adjustment and lower intimacy development. These results portend the promise of investigations of parental attachment style to elucidate contributions of parental attachment to late adolescent development and adjustment. John Bowlby's (1969, 1973) attachment theory has provided a theoretical paradigm from which to investigate the complexities of development throughout life. The necessity of parental ties for successful late adolescent development is a fundamental extension of Bowlby's (1969) original formulations, in which the infant's ability to explore the world is predicated on use of the parent as a secure base (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). Recent research has affirmed the importance of parental attachment for successful late adolescent development, as manifest in such challenges as adjusting to the demands of college life (Larose & Boivin, 1998; Rice, FitzGerald, Whaley, & Gibbs, 1995), becoming assertive in interpersonal relationships (Kenny, 1987,1990), and committing to career goals (Blustein, Walbridge, Friedlander, & Palladino, 1991). Realization of the potential of attachment theory that these studies portend requires expansion of existing assessment techniques (Kenny & Rice, 1995). This article presents two studies that provide evidence for the validity of a new means to classify parental attachment style from self-report data, thereby addressing a recognized lacuna in counseling measurement and facilitating expansion of the empirical basis of late adolescent attachment theory.