Abstract

We present the main psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (IPPA - Armsden and Greenberg 1987), a self-report instrument for use with adolescents, measuring attachment in relation to mother, father and peers. The inventory was translated by the back-translation method and administered to 789 subjects aged 13-18 yrs (mean age: 15.96). Exploratory factor analyses carried out separately on maternal, paternal and peer items revealed fudamentally unifactorial structures, with all the items loading substantially on the extracted factors. Successive confirmatory analyses, however, gave also support to the articulation of the three scales into the subscales of Trust, Communication and Alienation, as originally proposed by the inventory. Internal consistencies were very high for all scales and subscales, with Cronbach's alphas ranging from .86 to .94, with the exception of the three subscales of Alienation that showed insufficient reliabilities, with Cronbach's alphas ranging from .64 to .70. There was a moderate correlation between maternal and paternal scores (r =.45), and lower correlations between these scores and peer scores (r = .20 and r = .24 respectively). On the whole these results show that the Italian version of the IPPA provides factorially founded and reliable measures of overall security of attachment and of the sub-dimensions of Trust and Communication in relation to mother, father and peers.