ABSTRACT
Discussions of oral narratives often distinguish between the organization and the content of narratives-what some refer to as the “how” versus the “what” of the narrative. This distinction refers to two levels of analysis: The Wrst looks at the coherent link between the elements of the narrative-the “how,” and the second looks at the narrative themes and the way story protagonists are portrayed-the “what.” The central discovery from recent attachment research, and particularly from the work of Main involving adults’ narratives regarding their childhood attachment experiences (Hesse, 1999; Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985), is that the individual diVerences most pertinent for assessing attachment representations are revealed in the coherence of the narratives adults tell about childhood relationships, and that the content, “what” interviewees describe, is less relevant. The goal of this chapter is to describe a study that applied this critical distinction to the narratives of preschoolers by assessing separately the coherence and the content of such narratives, and linking these assessments to the preschoolers’ attachments to their mothers as measured when they were infants. Before we describe the study, we open with a review of the main concepts of attachment theory, emphasizing attachment behavioral strategies in infancy and their assessment, as well as Internal Working Models (IWMs) of attachment and their inXuence on children’s information processing. This is followed by a review of previous attachment/narrative studies, as well as the hypotheses that guided the present study.
