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Record W4412645605 · doi:10.1080/02615479.2025.2531859

Attachment theory and research: what should be on the core curriculum for child and family social workers?

2025· article· en· W4412645605 on OpenAlex
Sarah Foster, Gillian Schofield, Luke Geoghegan, Rick Hood, Avi Sagi-Schwartz, Lianne Bakkum, Dustin Hutchinson, William Balk, Richard A. Devine, Miriam Steele, Howard Steele, Ross Duncan, Jenni Guthrie, Julia Mannes, Alessandro Talia, Jane E. Pickerden, Luke Bailey, Cathrine Stanton, Brian Allen, Or Dagan, Jessica E. Opie, Marije L. Verhage, Sophie Reijman, P.S. Sterkenburg, Stefanella Costa‐Cordella, Ruan Spies, Anne Tharner, Pehr Granqvist, Tommie Forslund, Sheri Madigan, Carlo Schuengel, Mårten Hammarlund, Peter Fonagy, Robbie Duschinsky

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueSocial Work Education · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicChild Welfare and Adoption
Canadian institutionsCalgary General HospitalAlberta Children's HospitalAlberta Hospital EdmontonUniversity of Calgary
FundersEunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human DevelopmentNational Institute of Child Health and Human DevelopmentCanada Research ChairsDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
KeywordsSocial workCurriculumSociologyPsychologyPedagogyMedical educationMedicinePolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

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.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.623
Threshold uncertainty score0.996

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0050.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.102
GPT teacher head0.437
Teacher spread0.336 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it