Ecr-S

The Experiences in Close Relationship Scale – Short Form (ECR-S)

Test Information

* 12 items in seven point Likert-scale format (1 = Strongly Disagree, 7= Strongly Agree, 4=Neutral)

* 2 sets of six items measuring two orthogonal subscales of adult insecure attachment styles termed anxiety and avoidance.

* Defines avoidant as “an excessive need for self-reliance”.

* Defines anxious as “an excessive need for approval from others”.

* Designed for ease of use in various populations for research purposes and indicating attachment styles in adults.

* Requires minimal time to complete.

* Easy to score.

* Normed in six separate studies (N=851, N=425, N=229, N=122, N=257, N=65). The participants in each study were various proportions of men to women with the first one being closest to fifty-fifty. They were all normed on college campuses thus the mean age of each of the studies was around twenty one years old.

Development

* Original long version (ECR) was a 36 item questionnaire developed by Brennan, Clarke, and Shaver.

* The ECR was developed using a large question pool taken from various measures of attachment and administered to nearly 1100 college students. That research found the two distinct adult attachment dimensions measure in ECR.

* As of 2006 there was a general consensus among attachment researchers that the two dimensional model is valid.

* The six studies used to develop ECR-S reduced the original ECR from 36 (18 for each subscale) to 12 (6 for each subscale) questions and found them to have near equal reliability across these studies.

Psychometric Properties

Reliability

* Internal consistency as measured by coefficient alpha found to be about .80 for the anxious subscale and about .85 for the avoidant subscale.

* Reliability as measured by test-retest (r = .81 [anxious], r = .85 [avoidant]) indicated acceptable reliability. This was after a four week interval between test and retest in these...