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Attachment-based intervention improves Japanese parent-child relationship quality: A pilot study

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Abstract

As attachment-based interventions are widely practiced in the community, more evidence of intervention effect is necessary and there are few studies in non-Western contexts. This pilot study aimed to test the effectiveness of the attachment-based intervention, the Circle of Security Parenting (COSP) program, in an urban community in Japan. A one-group pretest, post-test, follow-up design was used. Twenty-six mothers with 1- to 6-years-old children attended group intervention sessions that consisted of COSP and additional individual video review sessions. The assessments were conducted four times for each participant: before COSP, after COSP, after the first phase of video review sessions, and 6-months after the intervention. COSP was effective in reducing parenting stress in the child domain, and the additional video reviews improved the quality of child attachment over time, as the number of children classified as secure increased at 6 months after the intervention. Mothers’ attachment representations and mothers’ stress in the parent domain did not change over time. The current pilot study provides the groundwork for further tests of the effectiveness of attachment-based interventions in Japan and other non-Western countries. Future studies with larger samples, control group, and randomization are needed including the addition of follow-up assessments to capture sleeper effects in the improvement of child attachment security, as well as the use of dimensions to capture subtle changes in attachment quality in the shorter term.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the help of the following people: Bert Powell gave training and continuous support for COS and COSP intervention; Neil Boris reviewed the manuscript to improve readability; Tatsuma Nakao gave advice in statistics analysis; undergraduate and graduate students assisted with data collection. Above all, we are grateful to the families who participated in our study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Letters, Konan University, Kobe, Japan

    Megumi Kitagawa

  2. Konan Institute of Human Sciences, Konan University, Kobe, Japan

    Megumi Kitagawa & Sayaka Iwamoto

  3. Counseling Room, Konan University, Kobe, Japan

    Sayaka Iwamoto

  4. Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan

    Tomotaka Umemura

  5. Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan

    Shimpei Kudo

  6. Ibaraki University, Mito, Japan

    Miyuki Kazui

  7. Kyoto Women’s University, Kyoto, Japan

    Hiromi Matsuura

  8. Institute of Education and Child Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands

    Judi Mesman

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  1. Megumi Kitagawa
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Megumi Kitagawa.

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Conflict of Interest

The first author is a certified COS and COSP facilitator, and has acted as a contracted trainer for Circle of Security International. Another authors have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

This research was conducted with approval from the University Human Research Ethics Committee of Konan University, under registered number 12–06.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all participants included in the study.

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Kitagawa, M., Iwamoto, S., Umemura, T. et al. Attachment-based intervention improves Japanese parent-child relationship quality: A pilot study. Curr Psychol 41, 8568–8578 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-01297-9

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