Brief Report: Factor Structure of the Experiences in Close Relationships with Gay and Lesbian Individuals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The mentality of society with regards to same-sex relationships has become more liberal over past few years and this has been reflected in governmental attitudes and actions. For example, Statistics Canada reports that number of self-identified gay men, lesbians and bisexuals has increased by 13% to 20% between 2003 and 2008 (depending on group) to 2.1% for Canadian men and 1.8% for Canadian women (Statistics Canada, 2008). Furthermore, in 2005, Government of Canada redefined civil marriage as the lawful union of two persons to exclusion of all others, thus recognizing union of same-sex couples (Hurley, 2005, p. 4). In United States, National Center for Health Statistics reported lifetime rates of same-sex sexual activity of 11% for women and 6% for men (National Center for Health Statistics, 2008). Although same-sex marriage is not currently accepted under Defense of Marriage Act in United States, both California and Massachusetts have recognized this union. There has also been a renewed interest in same-sex intimate relationships in scientific community but most research to date used measures which have not been validated for this population. The present study takes a first step toward validation of a measure of romantic attachment with same-sex couples by examining factor structure and reliability of Experiences in Close Relationships (ECR; Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998) using a sample of gay and lesbian individuals. Same-sex couples have same rights to evidence-based treatments as heterosexual couples, and this cannot be achieved without validating instruments used to empirically support treatment interventions. Several legislative bodies have proposed guidelines for working with minority populations. On one hand, psychologists have ethical responsibility of using validated instruments when assessing individuals for both research and clinical purposes. For example, American Psychological Association's Code of Conduct states that psychologists must assessment instruments whose validity and reliability have been established for use with members of population tested (American Psychological Association, 2002, p. 13). On other hand, clinicians are encouraged to use validated theoretical frameworks and empirically supported interventions that are relevant to specific needs of their clients (Canadian Psychological Association, 2000). As a number of empirically based therapeutic approaches are founded on concept of attachment, such as Interpersonal Psychotherapy (Teyber, 2006) and Emotionally Focused Therapy (Johnson, 2004) clinicians need a validated measure of adult attachment to assess attachment-related difficulties and to formulate therapeutic objectives when working with a population of gay and lesbian individuals. The attachment theory, developed by Bowlby (1969/1982), explains type of relation formed between an infant and his/her primary caregiver. The theory states that level of consistency at which caregiver is available and able to satisfy child's need for reassurance determines, to a large extent, whether a secure or insecure attachment will be formed, in other words, whether a positive or negative internal model of self and others will be developed. According to Bowlby, attachment system is present over entire lifespan and is manifested by seeking proximity of attachment figures in times of need or threat (Bowlby, 1988). The concept of attachment was empirically supported by Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall's (1978) famous Strange Situation task. Ainsworth et al. (1978) identified three patterns of attachment between infants and caregivers: secure, anxious and avoidant, which were later recognized as an appropriate conceptualization for adolescent and adult attachment by Hazan and Shaver (1987). In 1990, Bartholomew introduced a four-category model of attachment: secure (low anxiety, low avoidance), preoccupied (high anxiety, low avoidance), dismissing (low anxiety, high avoidance), and fearful (high anxiety, high avoidance) based on notion that both attachment anxiety and avoidance can be found in adults in varying degrees. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".