Quality of Early Relationships Rating Scale (QuERRS): A screening tool to aid psychotherapy assessment in people with mild to moderate learning disabilities

Abstract

We describe a pilot study of a brief screening tool to identify representations of early relationships that might suggest emotional insecurity (insecure representational style) in young people and adults with learning disabilities, who are presenting for individual psychological therapy. Internal consistency and inter-rater reliability are established, and then we consider the incidence of emotional insecurity in our clinical sample. Assignment to secure-insecure groups are then used as predictors of scores on an accepted global measure of clinical outcome (HoNOS-LD). We discuss the shortcomings and implications of our findings particularly in relation to whether what is measured is security-insecurity or ‘attachment style’. Further work is considered.