The Meaning of the Child in Qualitative Research: How to do Attachment-Informed Qualitative Analysis

Chapter 11 builds on the preceding chapter’s understanding of the Meaning of the Child Interview (MotC) and Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) as exploring the self- and child-protective aspects of participant meaning making in qualitative research. The attachment analysis generates understanding of specific relationships but needs to be combined with other methods to answer wider research questions and make links between participants. We sketch out basic pathways for doing this using three well-known qualitative methods:
Attachment-informed Thematic Analysis (TA) combines the attachment methods with TA. It provides a theory to drive the TA and offers an idiographic focus upon understanding a person before the group, and sensitivity to the relational context of the interview itself.
Attachment-informed Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) integrates the attachment analysis with IPA, with a shared interest in how people make sense of their experience and an idiographic sensibility.
Attachment-informed Case-based Research makes use of the attachment methods’ engagement with a rich personal context to develop explanations that are process orientated and local – keeping the participants’ web of relationships intact, before making connections with other cases to develop theory.
We explore the limitations and tensions involved in combining these methods, together with how they might be managed.