Last year, in the first year of my master’s degree, I conducted a research on the attachment relationship between fathers and their children and on children’s well-being. I wanted to observe the link between the father’s representation of attachment with their son or daughter (secure or insecure) and the child’s quality of life.
I began by a review of literature in order to make an inventory of all the studies about attachment, particularly to the father, about the effects of attachment on children’s development and on the concept of quality of life. To better understand attachment, I read Bowlby’s book (1978) and many articles of studies conducted by M. Bacro (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015) that were specifically aimed at father’s attachment. I discovered that child’s development was influenced by the relation with the father which is named “the father-child Activation Relationship”. Indeed, fathers help children to discover the world, they encourage them to take risks but they also offer a secure base. Moreover, I discovered with siblings that the eldest are less secure with their parents than only children. To study the quality of life and children’s well-being, I read Diener’s (1985, 1999) and Huebner’s articles (1991, 1993, 1994). This topic is quite recent so there is less research on the subject for the moment in comparison to the concept of attachment.
After the literature review, I suggested that an insecure attachment representation of the father towards his child was linked with lower quality of life in several dimensions: general, family, self and school. Furthermore, I suggested that presence of siblings was linked with lower general quality of life because of the risk of more insecure attachment.
This study was focused on 90 children attending to kindergarden in 4 schools of Loire-Atlantique. A quality of life questionnaire (Coudronnière, Bacro, Guimard, & Muller, in press) adapted from the MSLSS (Huebner, 1994) was administered to the children. This scale was a 30-items questionnaire that was used with puppets, to help the children’s identification during the test and because it was more playful. There were 4 puppets: two girls named Lilou and Maya (for little girls), and two boys named Basile and Hector (for little boys). The security towards the father’s attachment was evaluated by the Attachment Insecurity Screening Inventory (AISI) of Wissink et al. (2016), an auto-administered evaluation. This questionnaire revealed tendencies to avoidant, disorganized or ambivalent attachment.
To meet the children, 6 students went to different schools around the Loire-Atlantique. Each child was seen by two students. One of them manipulated puppets while the second asked questions. For example, the first student started by showing a puppet (Maya or Basile) and by saying with a big smile “Personally, I love going to school” then, he showed Lilou or Hector (the second puppet) and said with a sad face “Personally, I don’t like to go to school”. Immediately afterwards, the second student asked “And you (Child’s name), do you agree with Maya/Basile or with Lilou/Hector?” After the answer was given by the child, the second student asked “And do you agree a lot with “the puppet’s name” or a little?” while showing a little blue circle or a big blue circle. The student could then evaluate the answers on a sheet of paper with a 4-likert point scale: 1- Disagrees a lot; 2- Disagrees a little; 3- Agrees a little and 4- Agrees a lot. To administer the questionnaires which were meant for the parents, we handed them over to the teachers who then passed them on to the parents. We then retrieved the questionnaires from the schools at the end of the study. Sadly, we recovered less father’s questionnaires than mother’s questionnaires because they didn’t want to respond or were absent.
The results of this research do not show a significant link between insecurity of attachment to the father and a perceived lower quality of life. Similarly, the link between the presence of siblings and a lower quality of life was not proven to be significant for children between the ages of 3 to 5. However, I noticed that there were several biases in the study. First, binomials who meat the children changed each time, this could maybe influence children’s responses because of experimenters’ personality or their ease in facial expressions during manipulating puppets. Secondly, I saw that identification to puppets was more difficult for 3-years old than for 5-years old. Moreover, some children were a bit scared with the idea of talking to strangers, this can have impacted their answers. Thirdly, it is possible that some items of the AISI were not understood by the fathers because they don’t speak French or only very little.
To end the presentation of my research, I would like to conclude by saying that this study was very interesting but that to continue the investigation of these topics, the biases that I have discovered must be controlled.
Bibliography
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