ASI for Adults in Family Services: adoption, fostering and child protection
Our standardised research tool Attachment Style Interview (ASI) for adult attachment, followed by the Adolescent version (ASI-AD), have long been used in adoption, fostering and child protection services to determine whether there is insecurity in the attachment style of parents, carers and prospective parents. This has proved a very effective assessment of both risk and resilience in individuals and couples.
Training packages are available to workers in Adoption and Fostering (ASI-AF) and Child Care (ASI-CC). The Attachment Style Interview itself is exactly the same it is only the training that differs slightly. The differences in training are that case studies and implementation discussions are geared towards adoption and fostering in those services and child care for practitioners working in that field. The ASI Interview Pack, which is used to administer and rate the measure is the same for both and called ASI Interview Pack for adoption, fostering and child protection and child care.
The ASI relevance to Adoption and Fostering Teams is:
* To provide social workers in the field with a tool in assessing adoptive parents current supportive network, quality of close relationships and relating ability to help establish their likely resilience and ability to provide a stable family context for children.
* As a means of evidencing parents’ support needs over the course of crises that may arise with the child once placed.
* Its origins in scientific research outside the adoption field give it a useful independence of benchmarking, which provide for transparency and credibility in generating information relevant to family functioning.
Read an Adoption Today article describing the use of ASI as a pre-adoption assessment tool.
The ASI relevance to Children Services is:.
* It assesses strengths, resilience and risks in individuals, the couple relationship and the support system of families of children who have been significantly harmed or who are in need. As is the case with any assessment it should always be used alongside other measures and not as a stand-alone.
* It also contributes to determining the impact of these individual and family factors (which relate to the Family and Environmental Factors domain of the Assessment Framework).
* Its origins in scientific research outside the field give it a useful independence of benchmarking, which provide for transparency and credibility in generating information relevant to family functioning.
Read an ASI fact sheet summarising the use of Attachment Style Interview in court settings.