Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to compare the features of the Italian versions of two instruments for the assessment of attachment in preschool years: the Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT) (Bretherton, Ridgeway, Cassidy, 1990) and the Attachment Q-Sort. ( AQS) (Waters e Deane, 1985). More specifically, the study aims at verifying a) the convergent validity between ASCT and AQS; b) the concurrent validity between the measures obtained by ASCT and AQS and those ones of mothers' attachment obtained by Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) (Main, Kaplan, Cassidy, 1985); c) the discriminant validity of both ASCT and AQS by evaluating their independence from the assessment of children's temperament. Twenty children (8 females) aged 3 to 5 (M = 4,6; s.d. = 0,80) and their mothers participated to the research. The results support the validity of the AQS but not that one of the ASCT.