Using the attachment network Q-sort for profiling one’s attachment style with different attachment-figures

Astrid M. Kamperman; Cornelis G. Kooiman; Nicolas Lorenzini; Jurate Aleknaviciute; Jon G. Allen; Peter Fonagy

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0237576

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionDecember 27, 2019
4 Mar 2020 Decision Letter - Alexandra Kavushansky, Editor PONE-D-19-35791 Using the Attachment Network Q-sort for profiling one's attachment style with different attachment-figures PLOS ONE Dear Dr Kooiman, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by Apr 18 2020 11:59PM. When you are ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. To enhance the reproducibility of your results, we recommend that if applicable you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io, where a protocol can be assigned its own identifier (DOI) such that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). This letter should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Manuscript'. Please note while forming your response, if your article is accepted, you may have the opportunity to make the peer review history publicly available. The record will include editor decision letters (with reviews) and your responses to reviewer comments. If eligible, we will contact you to opt in or out. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Alexandra Kavushansky, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: 1. When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at http://www.journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and http://www.journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. We note that you have included the ANQ items in the S1 Appendix. As these are previously published and under copyright, as we understand, please remove them from the appendix and instead describe in the Methods section which items were used in the current study in sufficient detail such that other researchers could replicate the analyses. 3. We note your manuscript is layed out as landscape rather than portrait, can you therefore please amend your layout to portrait. 4. We note that you have indicated that data from this study are available upon request. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. For information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. * In your revised cover letter, please address the following prompts: a) If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially identifying or sensitive patient information) and who has imposed them (e.g., an ethics committee). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent. b) If there are no restrictions, please upload the minimal anonymized data set necessary to replicate your study findings as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. Please see http://www.bmj.com/content/340/bmj.c181.long for guidelines on how to de-identify and prepare clinical data for publication. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide. Additional Editor Comments (if provided): The rationale and hypotheses behind testing two various sets of participants (English vs. Dutch, psychiatric outpatients vs. controls) is not clearly stated neither in the abstract, nor in the Introduction section. In the abstract there is a statement that patients and non-patients were studied, without an explanation which patient were checked (heart disease? stroke?) and how and why they were compared to controls. Using DSM-IV criteria and axes is not justified either. Maybe I missed it, looks like in the “Statistics” section not all the tests performed (as appears from the Results section, e.g. tests comparing the 3 groups of patients, controls and healthy participants) are listed. A stronger link between the Introduction section, especially the hypotheses part, and the Discussion should be made. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Partly ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: This manuscript introduces a new measure (Attachment Network Q-Sort) designed to assess relationship-specific attachment styles, and presents evidence to support the validity of this measure. Overall the paper is well-written and I believe has the potential to make a contribution to the literature on adult attachment. Nonetheless, I have some lingering questions and concerns that could stand to be addressed. I discuss these issues in the space below. Introduction • Although I think this measure has considerable promise, I got lost a bit in the numerous explanations for its necessity. At various points the authors argue that such a measure is a) necessary to circumvent length/participant burden (as with the AAI), b) a matter of construct validity (pp. 6-7) that allows one to distinguish between attachment and non-attachment related items, and c) essential for trying to assess relationship-specific attachment styles. There is value in each of these goals, but the flow of the introduction sometimes made it hard for me to understand the value added of this particular measure, or what its main contribution to the literature might be. • In my view, the latter issue (assessing relationship-specific attachment styles) is most compelling. That is, attachment research has historically done a relatively poor job of accounting for the fact that many children are raised in the context of multiple attachment figures and many adults maintain multiple attachment-relevant relationships. To me this is the strongest case for a new measure in an already crowded field of measures, and I’d like to see this justification emphasized more strongly. • In contrast, I struggled a bit to fully understand the case that this measure (more than others) allows one to disentangle attachment with affective valence. That argument was unclear to me from the beginning (though I grasp the general idea), and I think perhaps there is a missed opportunity to establish more clearly discriminant validity. i.e., to show that associations with other measures in this manuscript differed among attachment vs. non-attachment items on the ANQ. • There could be more clarity on the scoring of the ANQ. One can somewhat deduce this by looking at the supplementary material, but there is in my view a lack of detail in the text. It was not until the results section that I realized this produces independent scores for secure, preoccupied, and dismissing styles. It is not discussed explicitly how these are scored, or at least that is not obvious to me. Especially given that other Q-sort based attachment measures (i.e, AQS) are calculated by correlating with a “criterion sort” (which I presume was not done here) I think it is important to be very clear in the explanation of scoring for this particular instrument. Method • One critical issue that I was not clear on is the extent to which the ANQ for mother/father is assessing representations of current relationships (as in the ECR) or early caregiving experiences (as in the AAI). The decision to include the ECR and not AAI as a measure of validity suggests that this is about current relationship with parents, and the items themselves seem to indicate refer to current rather than past relationship functioning. But this should be made abundantly clear throughout the manuscript. • This issue is also relevant when considering the length of the ANQ administration. 40 minutes is a relatively time-intensive instrument. It would represent a more efficient alternative to the AAI, but it’s not clear that this is really designed to be an alternative to the AAI. It is certainly much more time-consuming than adult attachment measures such as the ECR. But I’m not entirely clear on whether it’s meant to serve as a replacement for the ECR or a complement to it. If the former then further justification would be needed for adding a much more time-intensive instrument to the literature. Regardless, I think further clarification is needed. Results • Overall, the results section seemed appropriate and generally clear. But in places I was overwhelmed by the many different results reported. If it was possible to condense and remove some redundant and/or unnecessary detail that might make this section easier to follow. • For instance, it did not seem to me that the paper (either in the introduction or results/discussion) was particularly interested in distinctions between preoccupied vs. dismissing classifications. I wonder if simply using the secure/insecure distinction for the latent class analyses would be a simpler and cleaner way of presenting these data. • Perhaps more importantly is it necessary to present associations with every single subscale of every instrument (BSI, DAPP, CTQ, etc.)? I understand the value (particularly in a measurement validation paper) of having this information, but to me the story gets lost or is made more difficult to follow when the reader has to sort through many dozens of findings when a similar set of analyses using higher-order composites might tell a similar story. Discussion • In this section I continued to be confused by the discussion of attachment vs. non-attachment items (p. 32). I’m not suggesting that this isn’t an important issue. Only that it’s not obvious to me what this means (for scientific and/or clinical purposes) and this argument could perhaps be written more clearly. • I think the manuscript could benefit from further discussion of generalizability of this measure. Both in terms of which populations could use it, but also which relationships could be asked about. Clarification on the extent to which ANQ questions are generalizable to many types of relationships (beyond romantic partners and parents) might be important for guiding future research in this domain. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files to be viewed.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email us at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237576.r001
Revision 1
16 Jun 2020 Author Response Editor #1 We checked the PLOS ONE’s style requirements and prepared the manuscript accordingly. Editor #2 The ANQ items are included in Appendix S1. As these are not under copyright, we preferred to leave Appendix S1 as it is for clarity and readability of the manuscript. Editor #3 Accidently, initially the manuscript was submitted in landscape format. The layout is now corrected in portrait format. Editor #4 Unfortunately, ethical restrictions and patient confidentiality prohibit us from making the databases publicly accessible. All data are stored at the institutional database of the Erasmus Medical Centre, and will be made available upon request. At the end of the methods section we inform the interested reader how to get access to the files. Additionally, we have provided a maximum of information in our supplementary material. Editor additional comments: We re-drafted the Discussion to make it more congruent with the hypothesis part of the Introduction. • In the Abstract we added that the study is done in psychotherapy patients as well as in non-patient respondents. • In the Methods section and in the Discussion, we explained that the study was done in two samples (an English convenient sample from the general population and a Dutch sample of psychotherapy patients and of healthy respondents) taken together to ensure generisability of the instrument and the structures yielded by the study. • In the Methods section we explicated that in the Dutch sample DSM-IV criteria were applied necessary for the in- and exclusion criteria in the larger study of which this psychometric study was a part. • The statistics paragraph is checked for completeness. The tests the editor is referring to are described as follows: ‘Association between the obtained attachment subgroups and proximal variables were formally tested using Chi2-tests for categorical variables, ANOVA’s for normally distributed continuous variables, and Kruskal-Wallis tests for non-normally distributed continuous data. ’ Reviewer Introduction bullet 1 and 2 The reviewer is completely right in assuming that the most important quality of the ANQ is its focus on assessing relationship-specific attachment styles. We now emphasize this more strongly in the Discussion. Reviewer Introduction bullet 3. In the construction of the ANQ the distinction between items that theoretically were considered attachment items versus non-attachment items, was assumed to be important. However, this distinction is empirically not confirmed as both sets of items are highly correlated with each other. As shown in table 3, and accompanying text in the Results section discriminant validity of the ANQ results regarding the non-attachment items was not shown This is now more clearly explained in the Discussion. Reviewer Introduction bullet 4 A description of the scoring of the ANQ is added in the methods section. Reviewer Method bullet 1 We now explain throughout the manuscript that the ANQ assesses current attachment styles towards the key-figures chosen. Reviewer Method bullet 2 In the Discussion we added our reasons why the more elaborate ANQ could be an alternative for the ECR(-r) which indeed is shorter. Reviewer Results bullet 1 In the Results section we removed a detailed description of the results on the DAPPsf to improve the readability of the manuscript. The details themselves are still presented in the table. Reviewer Results bullet 2 The reviewer is correct. Preoccupied and dismissive subscale scores point generally in the same direction. However, the confirmative factor analysis showed that combining the dismissive and preoccupied subscales into a single insecure subscale did not result in a better fit (Model C in S2 tables 1a-c, see also model interpretation at the end of S2). This statistical argument, in combination with the underlying theory of ANQ which distinguished a preoccupied and dismissive component, resulted in our decision to retain both subscales in the latent class analyses. It might be possible that a larger dataset might have resulted in more classes, both in terms of differentiation between the preoccupied and dismissive subscale, as well as differentiation between attachment figures. Reviewer Results bullet 3 We understand the comment of the reviewer on the detailed information given. We tried to shorten the text taking this into consideration in the Results and Discussion sections of the manuscript but to retain the analytic information in the tables. If the editor prefers, we are willing to remove this table from the text and move it to the appendix. Reviewer Discussion bullet 1 We understand that the discussion of the supposed importance of attachment versus non-attachment items could be much better. We tried to improve this in the Results and Discussion sections. Reviewer Discussion bullet 2 We added in the Discussion possible applications of the ANQ. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: response to reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237576.r002
30 Jul 2020 Decision Letter - Alexandra Kavushansky, Editor Using the Attachment Network Q-sort for profiling one's attachment style with different attachment-figures PONE-D-19-35791R1 Dear Dr. Kooiman, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Alexandra Kavushansky, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237576.r003
Formally Accepted
5 Aug 2020 Acceptance Letter - Alexandra Kavushansky, Editor PONE-D-19-35791R1 Using the Attachment Network Q-sort for profiling one's attachment style with different attachment-figures Dear Dr. Kooiman: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Alexandra Kavushansky Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237576.r004

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .