TY  - JOUR
A1  - Becke, Sophia Daphne
A1  - Bongard, Stephan
T1  - Using photo elicitation to introduce a network perspective on attachment during middle childhood
T2  - International journal of qualitative methods
N2  - In this article, we develop a child-centered network approach to attachment during middle childhood. Following monotropic ideas, current attachment research focuses on parental attachment figures despite the expansion of the children’s social environment during middle childhood, failing to generate a comprehensive and structured overview of all individuals who ensure the children’s feeling of safety. Relying on quantitative methods, these studies are also dominated by an adult perspective, limiting the children’s contributions. While there have been theoretical drafts of attachment networks during childhood, this article constitutes the first practical implementation. Using photo elicitation interviews and participant observations, we developed an innovative assessment strategy that allows children to exhaustively identify and characterize all their attachment figures on sociostructural and functional dimensions, thus positioning the children at the center of their comprehensive attachment networks that collectively contribute to their feeling of security. We combine qualitative and quantitative data to assess the children’s own understanding of their feeling of security and to locate the individual attachment figure on context-specific social dimensions, thus making the research setting, a clan in Cameroon, an inherent part of the methodological development. The data are translated into multidimensional network diagrams to visualize the children’s perception of their attachment environment and the emerging patterns of their selection. We present an exemplary network, supplementing it with observational data to discuss the ecological validity of our approach.
KW  - photo elicitation
KW  - case study
KW  - ethnography
KW  - ethnomethodology
KW  - grounded theory
Y1  - 2018
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/47907
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-479070
SN  - 1609-4069
N1  - This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
VL  - 17
IS  - 1
SP  - 1
EP  - 12
PB  - Sage Publishing
CY  - London
ER  -