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Admissibility of attachment theory, research and assessments in child custody decision‐making? Yes and No!
Stockholm University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Psychology, Personality, Social and Developmental Psychology.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-5519-9956
Stockholm University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Psychology, Personality, Social and Developmental Psychology.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-2527-9357
Stockholm University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Psychology, Personality, Social and Developmental Psychology.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-0747-5028
2021 (English)In: New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, ISSN 1520-3247, E-ISSN 1534-8687, Vol. 2021, no 180, p. 125-140Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Attachment theory, research, and assessments have become increasingly applied to settle child custody cases. We discuss such applications in relation to admissibility criteria for scientific evidence and testimony proposed by Faigman et al. (2014). We argue that attachment theory and research can provide valid “framework evidence”; group-based attachment research has yielded general principles suitable as a frame of reference for pertinent court decisions. In particular, child custody decision-making should generally be guided by research indicating that children benefit from attachment networks. In contrast, assessments of attachment quality fall short of providing valid “diagnostic evidence”; information that a specific individual/dyad is a “true” instance of a general group-level principle. In particular, such assessments do not yield valid information about whether a particular caregiver has better caregiving skills than another caregiver and will better support child development. We conclude that attachment theory and research should be admissible for framework but not for diagnostic testimony.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2021. Vol. 2021, no 180, p. 125-140
Keywords [en]
admissibility, attachment theory, child custody, evidence
National Category
Psychology
Research subject
Psychology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:su:diva-204233DOI: 10.1002/cad.20447ISI: 000799057400008PubMedID: 34962346Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85128027080OAI: oai:DiVA.org:su-204233DiVA, id: diva2:1654523
Note

This work was supported by grants from the Swedish Research Council (Grant 2017-03315) and the Swedish research Council for Health, Working Life, and Welfare (Grant 2017-01182) awarded to Pehr Granqvist and Tommie Forslund.

Available from: 2022-04-27 Created: 2022-04-27 Last updated: 2022-06-29Bibliographically approved

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Forslund, TommieHammarlund, MårtenGranqvist, Pehr

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