Attachment theory and research: what should be on the core curriculum for child and family social workers?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Attachment theory is one of the core theories proposed for child and family social work, but concerns have been raised regarding misunderstandings and misapplications. Misinformation about attachment is widespread, and texts and teaching on attachment theory often emphasise aspects of the theory that have limited value for applied practice while other elements with greater practice value are often overlooked. As an international group of social work and clinical educators, practitioners, and attachment researchers, we propose an updating of the core social work curriculum on attachment. We present eight core concepts from attachment theory and research. These concepts support thinking about children's relational needs and behaviour, caregiving characteristics, and broader contextual factors. We argue that these concepts are particularly relevant for social work with children and families and should form the basis of teaching on attachment. We also address prevalent myths about attachment, to help protect students from misinformation and simplistic accounts, and support them to challenge misuses of attachment theory. Our recommended curriculum update aims to help trainee social workers appreciate the value of attachment theory for their practice and use the theory in helpful and appropriate ways.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.062 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.003 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".