EVALUATION OF ATTACHMENT PATTERN REPRESEN TATIONS IN MEXICAN CHILDRENTHROUGH FAMILY DESIGNS - A ONE-YEAR FOLLOW-UP

Attachment theory, initially developed by Bowlby and later by Ainswort h, describes emotional and cognitive development on the basis of the b ond developed in childhood between young children and their attachment figure. This theory has served as a conceptual model to explain the e ffects of the mother's employment on child development. In a previous study, Lara et al (14) assessed the effects of the mother's occupation on children's representations of attachment. The aim of the present s tudy was to assess the consistency of the attachment categories, devel oped in the first study, one year later. This was of great importance to us as the first study lead us to some interesting findings. On the one hand, we found a very low percentage of children classified as sec ure, and on the other, we found no influence of the mothers' occupatio nal status on children's attachment representations. In the follow up stage a subsample of 48 children (from a sample of 211) was assessed i n terms of attachment representations obtained from family drawings. C hildren's age at first evaluation ranged from 5 to 6 years and eleven months old. Findings showed that 77% of the cases remained within the same classification, while 17% changed form the first to the second on e. We interpreted these results as somehow expected. It has been asser ted that, although a great stability of these patterns through life is presumed, some of the main attachment patterns may disorganize due to developmental and environmental factors. Thus, these variations canno t necessarily be interpreted as a reliability problem. Therefore it ca n be said that great consistency was observed in the majority of the c ases and only in the remaining 6%, errors due to classification were d etected. These results give evidence of the reliability of our classif ication system of attachment patterns, and thus we can, with greater c onfidence, sustain our previous conclusions (Lara et al.) (14) regardi ng the lack of effects of maternal employment on children's attachment representations, and the very low percentage of children from this po pulation with secure attachment. Some possible causes are discussed in this paper.