POSTPONED – The Child Attachment Interview – Phoenix, AZ

The Child Attachment Interview

About this course

The Child Attachment Interview (CAI) course provides a good grounding in the use and application of the instrument to assessing and understanding attachment in middle childhood. The training is designed to familiarize participants with the method and covers both administration and coding of the CAI. Participants completing the CAI training component will gain a good understanding of how to administer and code interviews and this knowledge may be useful as a framework for understanding children’s attachment difficulties. This course does not provide certification as a reliable CAI coder and this may be required if the CAI was to be part of a formal and rigorous assessment, both for research or clinical purposes.
To become an accredited CAI coder you will need to complete a second phase of training to ensure reliability which is undertaken separately and includes the additional coding of 30 interviews provided by Yael Shmueli-Goetz, the course leader. We are in the process of creating new teaching materials for this, to comply with new data protection regulations, and we hope to be able to offer an updated version of the reliability training in the future.

Who is this course suitable for?

Child mental health professionals, researchers, social workers and teachers. Some experience of interviewing children would be an advantage, as would some familiarity with attachment theory, methods or research. However, nothing beyond interest in learning about the method is required.

Aims of course

To teach the rationale and technique of using the CAI as a tool for the assessment of child-parent attachment relationships in middle childhood (8-15 year olds) through videotaped interview.
This includes the teaching of the manualised method of coding and reviewing various interviews, providing practice in the coding of the CAI. The CAI training and associated materials are copyright of the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families. At present the only way to be trained in using the CAI tool is through the Centre’s training and reliability test.

Trainer:

Yael Shmueli-Goetz, PhD
Yael completed her PhD at the Department of Clinical and Health Psychology, University College London, on the development and validation of the Child Attachment Interview (CAI). For the last 7 years, Yael has been responsible for delivering training on the administration and coding of the CAI both in the UK and abroad. As part of her role, Yael consults to diverse research projects and clinical services on the application of the CAI and the interpretation of its findings. Additionally, Alongside Pasco Fearon, Yael is overseeing a large scale unique study, the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), looking at the behavioural genetics of attachment in adolescence in a sample of 650 families. Yael has a keen interest in how attachment is expressed across development, and in further uncovering the mechanisms underlying the transmission of attachment patterns from one generation to the next. To that end, Yael is currently supervising a PhD student working on establishing the role played by maternal and paternal mentalization in shaping attachment in adolescence.

No CECs are provided for this training