The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), developed by Mary Main and associates, has been identified as an effective, psychometrically sound instrument with which to measure an individual's internal working model or state of mind regarding childhood attachment. The potentially detrimental influences of poor recall, social desirability, and naive lying associated with self-report measures of childhood attachment are substantially bypassed with the AAI. The AAI does not make classifications based primarily on reported events in childhood but rather on the thoughtfulness and coherency with which the adult is able to describe and evaluate these childhood experiences and their effects.

The AAI is a structured, semiclinical 20-question interview designed to elicit the individual's account of his or her childhood attachment experiences, together with his or her evaluations of those ...