Session: Assessing Child Well-Being and the Parent Child Attachment: Using the Working Model of the Child Interview (Society for Social Work and Research 15th Annual Conference: Emerging Horizons for Social Work Research)

Assessing child well-being and the parent-child attachment: Using the Working Model of the Child Interview

This symposium brings together three social work researchers who use the Working Model of the Child Interview (WMCI; Zeanah et al, 1986) to study infant mental health among families who are experiencing situational risk factors, including homelessness, substance abuse and foster care placement. The WMCI is a one-hour interview that elicits and classifies caregivers' perceptions and subjective experience of their child and relationship with the child, which is related to concurrent and future attachment to the caregiver. The WMCI is divided into six scales that are used to characterize the caregiver's representation of the infant: richness of detail, openness to change, intensity of involvement, coherence, caregiving sensitivity and acceptance. Each scale is coded based on the age of the infant being described. In addition, the affective tone of the mother's representation is coded on a 5-point scale to score the amount of joy, anxiety, pride, anger, guilt, indifference, disappointment or other emotions expressed by the caregiver in the interview. Some researchers use the newly developed WMCI-D scale which allows for classification of infant's with disorganized attachment and corresponding unresolved adult attachment.

Clear evidence now exists demonstrating that the quality of the relationship between the primary caregiver and child in the first years of life is central to a child's later functioning (Carnegie Corporation,1994; Zeanah, 2000). A smaller body of research has documented that there is also a sleeper effect in which the improvements in the child's emotional well-being effect the mother's depression and coping capacities (Chazan-Cohen et. al., 2007). Much of this evidence comes from researchers working with the framework of attachment theory who have noted patterns of individual differences in attachment quality that can be identified reliably in both the behavior and the internal representational model of both parent and child (Ainsowrth, Blehar, Waters & Wall, 1978; Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson & Collins, 2005). There is evidence from longitudinal studies that attachment quality has an important influence on the success of a child's developmental pathway toward self-reliant adulthood (Kobak, Cassidy,Lyons-Ruth & Ziv, 2006). Insecure attachments are seen as indicators of psychopathology when co-occurring within the context of additional risk factors (Sroufe et al, 2005).

The three papers presented examine child well-being within three high-risk situations: children in foster care, children with substance abusing mothers and children in homeless single parent families. Each study demonstrates the usefulness of the Working Model of the Child to provide assessment data that can be useful for the creation of improved social services to meet the dual needs of mother and child.

The discussant has many years of experience working with severely abused and neglected children. He will discuss the papers within a dialectical/transactional theoretical perspective, exploring the effects of distal risks on caregiving sensitivity.