The Adult Attachment Interview – online training 18 days

Overview

The Adult Attachment Interview is a procedure for assessing adults’ self-protective strategy, using the Dynamic-Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation (DMM). The DMM is an expansion of the Bowlby-Ainsworth theory of individual differences in attachment (Crittenden, 1995, 2008, 2016). The DMM discourse analysis method as applied to the AAI (Crittenden & Landini, 2011) associates self-protective strategies with transformations of information that motivate adaptive and maladaptive behaviour. Knowing a person’s self-protective attachment strategy can guide treatment decisions in efficient ways while reducing the probability of misapplied, harmful treatment approaches.
This course teaches discourse analysis and classification for the AAI, for non-risk and (mild) out-patient clinical applications of the AAI, using the DMM method.
It involves 18 days of full-time effort coding transcripts. Following the basic course members may take a fourth 8-day unit that covers very complex patterning.

Benefits to clinicians of taking the AAI course:

  • Provide crucial history about danger and its impact on personal adaptation, particularly as it affects psychological treatment
  • Change the way you hear language, especially in treatment
  • Change the way you use language, especially in treatment
  • Establish a shared knowledge base with your client/patient
  • Create compassion where there was blame or doubt
  • Create a way of working together in treatment
  • Jumpstart the treatment or restart a stalled treatment
  • Set the speaker’s mind in motion
  • Enable therapists to find the person’s ZPD regarding their child
  • Enable the therapist to avoid blind alleys
  • Permit reliable coders to classify the strategies used by individuals.
  • Note: coding reliability and earning a coding certificate usually requires more effort than this 18 day course.

Health Warning

The AAI offers a unique opportunity to further professional development but it is also very demanding. Achieving reliability for clinical use will take at least a year and for coding/research at least two years. Only those who reach a satisfactory level of competence in a pre-test will be allowed to proceed to the reliability test.

You need to allow a minimum of 4 to 6 hours a week for practice outside of the taught weeks.

Mandatory Course Requirements

  1. Attachment, Neurodevelopment, & Psychopathology before completing the AAI course (i.e., ANP may be taken concurrently). UK course details can be found here. Details of courses elsewhere in the world can be found here.
  2. Bachelor’s Degree or its academic equivalent.

It is essential that trainees attend all 18 days of the course.

There is weekly coding work between the teaching weeks with an optional tutorial focused on the practice transcripts. A reliability test will follow on for those who reach a satisfactory level of competence in a pre-test at the conclusion of the final set of practice transcripts.
 

Not completing the practice transcripts is likely to seriously impede the level of reliability that can be achieved.

The Family Relations Institute issues participants with a reliability certificate stating the percent agreement with the standard. This reliability can be reported. Evidence of reliability should be requested if the participant will code data for others.

Competence in interviewing is also assessed and therefore course participants are required to submit 3 Adult Attachment Interviews for feedback (two non-risk, 1 clinical), during the course. Feedback will be given after each interview and a certificate issued if interviewing skills are judged to be satisfactory. 

Course Reader

Assessing Adult Attachment: A Dynamic-Maturational Approach to Discourse Analysis. Crittenden, P.M. & Landini, A. (2011). New York: Norton.

Course timings

The course will be delivered online via Zoom video conference.

Training days will begin at 1pm and end at 5pm (UK time). You will be required to read and classify a transcript before each training day starts. Consequently, participants should be entirely free of other obligations during the training.

Includes

The course, feedback on participant’s 3 AAIs, practice transcripts and a weekly tutorial between sessions, and the reliability test (for those who reach a satisfactory level of competence in a pre-test).

Upcoming Dates

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