Attachment-Based Interview Analysis: The MotC and AAI as a Research Method

Chapter 10 is the first of two chapters looking at how the Meaning of the Child Interview (MotC) can be used to research parent-child relationships. We suggest the MotC has significant potential in qualitative and quantitative research, offering both a quantifiable scale, and a rich understanding of parent-child relationships. The predominance of quantitative studies in attachment research, using only classifications in statistical analysis, has led to confusion as to how assessment tools such as the MotC and the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) work, and particularly their qualitative nature. Like other qualitative methods, the MotC and the AAI look for patterns of meaning-making in an interview transcript. In particular, the MotC and AAI share the focus of Narrative Analysis and Discourse Analysis upon the coherence of spoken narratives, but they interpret a lack of coherence in terms of the emotional needs and history of the person giving the account. The focus on threat in the environment and the defensive nature of how we perceive and interpret the world gives the analysis a very different flavour to other qualitative methods. This divergent history and purpose, we argue, have resulted in overlaps and similarities that offer rich possibilities for qualitative research.