What is the Attachment Style Interview?

The Attachment Style Interview (ASI) helps to assess the attachment styles and close relationships of individual parents and carers, including with their partners, and their use of social support. The ASI is proving useful in the adoption and fostering field to plan matches and placement support for fostered and adopted children and their families. The ASI can also be used in child care and the training is adapted to focus on its' use in either adoption and fostering or child care contexts.

Information on Training Course: Using the Attachment Style Interview in adoption and fostering or child care contexts

Aim of the training
Originally designed in the research field the Attachment Style Interview for Adoption / Fostering (ASI-AF) is an evidence-based assessment tool for the purposes of anticipating post-placement support needs in adoption/fostering. The ASI-AF was developed by the Lifespan Group at the Royal Holloway, University of London and Child and Family Training now run ASI-AF training courses throughout the United Kingdom. The ASI-AF is referred to in the DfES Practice Guidance on Preparing and Assessing Adopters and the Practice Guidance Assessing the Adoption Support Needs of Adoptive Families.

The aim of the four day training is to introduce the ASI-AF and to build up practitioners’ skills in using The Attachment Style Interview model and methods for making assessments of characteristics of parents and carers in terms of the quality of their close relationships, including their marital/partner relationship, social support, their attitudes towards using support and the security of their attachment style.

Who is the training for?
The ASI-AF training course is designed for social care practitioners working in the field of adoption/fostering who wish to use the measure as part of their assessment of prospective adopters and to assess and plan for the support needs of adoptive parents and foster carers.

Who are the trainers?
Training courses for groups of social care staff are delivered by Child and Family Training. All the trainers are accredited and have been trained by Professor Antonia Bifulco and her team in the Lifespan Research group at Royal Holloway, University of London, who designed the measure in the research world. There are also generic ASI-AF training courses which individual members of staff can apply to attend.

Training course – costs and equipment
The ASI-AF training takes place over 4-days, with agency-specific training is usually taking place on site. The cost of the 4-day training is £500 plus VAT per trainee plus trainers expenses. All the necessary training materials are provided, as well as Users Guide and two Interview Packs to help trainees continue to use the ASI-AF in their practice.

Trainees must be able to commit to all 4 days to enable them to use the measure reliably. Day 1 provides an overview of the ASI-AF categories and rating procedures, the interview and rating system and Day 2 is intensive training in scoring the quality of a marital/partner relationship, support and relating ability. This will be aided by DVD clips of interviews with prospective adopters about their close relationships and support contexts. Day 3 is intensive training in assessing attachment style in terms of secure and insecure styles and those enmeshed, fearful, dismissive and withdrawn. Trainees will acquire reliable scoring of interviews and vignettes and the final Day 4 is a quality control day with trainees will returning after completion of a pilot interview to discuss rating thresholds and experiences of administering the interview in adoption practice. The implementation of the ASI-AF in the context of adoption and fostering is also explored.

Trainees are required to complete tasks as homework as part of the course. This includes completing and scoring an ASI-AF interview. The interview needs to be tape- recorded for scoring purposes and so the agency needs to ensure that staff on the training have access to a tape-recorder with a microphone. They will also need to use a tape-recorder when they use the ASI-AF in their future practice.

What is the background of the ASI-AF?
Designed by Professor Antonia Bifulco and her team at Royal Holloway, the ASI research interview for parents has been used extensively in research studies to examine psychosocial risks for mental health problems. Its reliability and validity is established among researchers (including several cross cultural studies) and high levels of association are found with depression outcomes and social factors such as poor support, low self-esteem and early adverse childhood experience. However, its introduction into the adoption/field is comparatively new.

The ASI-AF's relevance to the adoption/fostering field is:

• To examine impact of stressful parenting post adoption/fostering placement. It is envisioned as a means of predicting parents' support needs post-placement and tracking such needs over the course of crises that may arise with the placed child.
• To provide social workers in the field with a new tool in assessing adoptive parents to help establish permanency of placement.
• To provide social workers with a standardised evidence-based assessment tool to use with adopters and foster carers. Its origins in scientific research outside the adoption field give the ASI-AF a useful independence of benchmarking, which provide for transparency and credibility in generating information relevant to carers close relationships and family functioning.

What are the learning objectives for the course?

• Day 1 Objective: The objective of the first day workshop is to give an overview of the ASI-AF through presentations and video sessions.
• Day 2 Objective: The second day enables good understanding of the Support component of the ASI-AF through the use of DVD interview clips.
• Day 3 Objective: The objective of the third day is to enable good understanding of the Overall Attachment style ratings through the use of DVD interview clips.
• Pilot interview: An essential part of the Attachment Style Interview for Adoption/Fostering (ASI-AF) training course is the undertaking of a pilot interview by the trainee. This can be with a friend, or in a professional context.
• Day 4 Objective: The final day of the ASI-AF training involves all trainees presenting their pilot interview to trainers and each other. The aim is to reinforce trainees ASI-AF rating benchmarks. Time is also set aside for discussion of the use of the ASI-AF in adoption/fostering practice.

What are the expected learning outcomes for participants?

• To learn all ASI-AF support and attachment attitudinal benchmarks, enabling participants conduct and rate a reliable ASI-AF interview.
• To participate in and understand the importance of quality control for semi-structured interviews of this kind.
• To consider and understand the uses of the ASI-AF in the adoption/fostering context.

Read an article from Adoption Today magazine describing the use of ASI as a pre-adoption assessment tool.

The Attachment Style Interview Child Care
The Attachment Style Interview Child Care (ASI-CC) has recently been developed as a practice tool (in addition to Adoption and Fostering teams). The ASI-CC is the same measure adapted for use in child care practice, with information about its use with birth parents in Safeguarding, Looked After Children and Family Support teams.

The new ASI is particularly useful in Children's Social Care because it assesses strengths, resilience and risks in individuals, the couple relationship and the support system of families of children who have been significantly harmed or who are in need. It also contributes to determining the impact of these individual and family factors (which relate to the Family and Environmental Factors domain of the Assessment Framework) on the capacity of parents to provide adequate care to meet the needs of their children i.e. their Parenting Capacity. The aim of this ASI therefore is to form a crucial part in information gathering, analysis and planning outcome-focused interventions in the context of safeguarding children and supporting children in need and their families. The ASI is one of a range of assessment tools developed to assist professionals in making standardised, evidence-based assessments of children and their families.

The Attachment Style Interview Pack itself is exactly the same in ASI-AF and ASI-CC, it is only the training that differs slightly. The differences in training are that case studies and implementation discussions are geared towards adoption and fostering in those services and child care for practitioners working in that field.

Future use of the ASI-AF and ASI-CC
Following the ASI-AF training, staff will need to use the ASI-AF Interview packs in future practice. These should be obtained from the Lifespan Research Group lifespantraining@rhul.ac.uk or 0207 307 8619.

It is also recommended that all trainees have the first few ASI’s, or at least any more complex ones, checked by the Lifespan team. This is especially relevant to those who are Independent social workers or psychologists, or are the only ones of a team to train in ASI. Cases can be sent by email or as hard copies. Full feedback of scoring, and advice on any further evidence needed is provided, for a small fee. To access this service trainees should contact Lifespan Research Group, as above.