TPC Journal V7, Issue 3 - FULL ISSUE

212 The Professional Counselor | Volume 7, Issue 3 area in which they felt it useful to communicate their understanding and children’s experiences of IF. For example, the interviewer asked: How has IF been demonstrated in your children?; What have you noted in terms of your children’s friendly behaviors?; and what has influenced your children’s behaviors based on your perceptions? Quantitative data were generated from a self-report questionnaire posted on PsychData, consisting of measures for attachment and IF along with items measuring children’s former institutionalization experiences and parents’ caregiving quality. Attachment was measured by the adapted Attachment Q-Sort (AQS; Chisholm et al., 1995), which was based on the original AQS developed by Waters and Deane (1985). The adapted AQS contained 23 items measured by a 5-point scale, from 1 = very unlike my child to 5 = very like my child . A sample item from the adapted AQS was: “Your child clearly shows a pattern of using you as a base from which to explore, that is, he/she moves out to play, returns, and then moves out to play again.” Scores for the 23 items were summed, leading to a total attachment score. A higher attachment score means that a child was better attached with the respondent. Van IJzendoorn, Vereijken, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & Riksen-Walraven (2004) reported a modest stability of AQS for the first five years of children’s lives. In the Netherlands, Pool, Bijleveld, and Tavecchio (2000) applied the instrument to assess attachment security in 45 children with ages ranging from 2 to 6 years old. Good convergent validity of AQS has been established, with a .50 correlation ( r score) between AQS and the Strange Situation Procedure (Vaughn & Waters, 1990). Reliability of the adapted AQS was manifested through Cronbach α coefficients, ranging from .65–.72 (Chisholm et al., 1995) to .77–.80 (Chisholm, 1998). The Cronbach α value for this study was .83. IF in this study was measured by the frequently used Five-Item Indiscriminately Friendliness Measure (i.e., the 5-item IF measure; Chisholm et al., 1995). The five items represent uncommonly friendly behaviors exhibited by children. The five items measure children’s friendliness level to strangers; whether or not the children were shy/behaved in a strange manner; children’s reactions to newly met adults; children’s willingness to go home with newly met adults; and children’s tendency to wander. Respondents selected 1 = Yes if the child showed the described behavior in the item; if no untypical friendly behavior was detected in the child, a 0 = No was chosen. A higher IF score indicates that the child displayed a higher level of IF behaviors. The Cronbach α coefficients of the measure were .58–.72 in Chisholm (1998) and .78–.81 in Pears, Bruce, Fisher, and Kim (2011). The Cronbach α value of the measure in this study was .58. The internal consistency was relatively low but acceptable based on similar values generated in earlier studies by the same measure (Chisholm, 1998; van den Dries et al., 2012). In addition to the two existing measures, a demographic survey was included in the quantitative questionnaire, including questions asking children’s ages and institutionalization experiences. Children’s institutionalization experiences were assessed using questions on children’s physical growth statuses when arriving in the United States (i.e., weight), their length of institutionalization, and participants’ perception of the institutional care that their children had received prior to adoption (i.e., 1 = was not in an orphanage ; 2 = high quality care ; 3 = acceptable quality care ; 4 = poor quality care ). A higher total institutionalization score implied more positive institutionalization that a child had experienced. Parents’ caregiving quality/responsive parenting was measured by the authoritative parenting subscale of the Parenting Styles and Dimensions Questionnaire (Robinson, Mandleco, Olsen, & Hart, 2001), with a Cronbach α value of .84 for the present study. Research Design The current literature on IF indicates the complexity of the phenomenon because of its frequent