The Adult Attachment Interview – online training18 days
Upcoming Dates
Overview
The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) is a procedure for assessing adults’ strategies for identifying, preventing and protecting the self from perceived dangers, particularly dangers tied to intimate relationships.
The DMM-AAI course is based on an expansion of the Main and Goldwyn procedure and is both a useful research tool and a potential guide for a wide range of professionals. Therapists, in particular, learn not only new ways to conceptualise troubled development, but also ways to identify, in adults, distortions of the mental processing of information, particularly information relevant to disorders of feelings, thought, and behaviour.
The techniques for interpreting speech can be useful even if the professional does not formally use the interview itself in practice.
The basic training addresses the patterns found in normative and out-patient treatment populations. 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.
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 4 to 6 hours a week for practice outside of the taught weeks.
Mandatory Course Requirements
Crittenden’s Attachment, Neurodevelopment and Psychopathology course is a prerequisite to the AAI course. UK course details can be found here.
Details of courses elsewhere in the world can be found here.
It is essential that trainees attend all 18 days of the course.
There will be homework practice transcripts to code following the 3 teaching weeks. An option tutorial focused on the practice transcript is offered. A reliability test will follow on for those who reach a satisfactory level of competence in 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 6pm (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
All teaching, weekly feedback on practice AAIs and registration with Dr Crittenden for the reliability test (for those who reach a satisfactory level of competence in the final set of practice transcripts).
