The ECR-R scale: how attachment style is really measured

What is the ECR-R scale?

ECR-R stands for “Experiences in Close Relationships-Revised.” It’s a questionnaire of 36 statements about how you experience romantic relationships, which you rate from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Eighteen statements measure attachment anxiety, and eighteen measure attachment avoidance. It was published in 2000 by Chris Fraley, Niels Waller, and Kelly Brennan in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It’s free to use, which partly explains why it became the most widely used adult attachment questionnaire in the world.

Its story starts two years earlier. In 1998, Kelly Brennan, Catherine Clark, and Phillip Shaver gathered every existing adult attachment scale in English: 323 statements drawn from 60 subscales, which they gave to 1,086 college students. The statistical analysis showed that this whole jumble boiled down to two nearly independent factors: anxiety and avoidance. From that they built the ECR, with 36 statements. In 2000, Fraley, Waller, and Brennan went back to the same pool of statements with a finer method, item response theory, to pick the ones that measure best at every level. That’s the ECR-R.

Why does a scale deserve a page on a site for couples? Because it changed how we think about attachment. It used to be that you were sorted into a box. Now you’re placed on a map. And that difference changes what you can do with your result: a box is something you endure, a position is something you can move.

The central idea

Adult attachment isn’t made of three or four types but of two continuous dimensions. Each of us has a level of attachment anxiety, from very low to very high, and a level of attachment avoidance, from very low to very high. The four styles (Secure, Anxious, Avoidant, Disorganized) are the four corners of that map, and most people sit somewhere between the corners. The question is no longer “am I anxious or avoidant?” but “how high am I on each axis, right now, in this relationship?”

Key concepts

The attachment anxiety axis

This axis measures how much it alarms you when the other person might not be there. The statements in this half of the questionnaire are about fear of being abandoned, worry that you matter less to them than they do to you, the need for reassurance, and anger when the other person isn’t as available as you’d like. A high score describes a system that turns up the volume as soon as the bond feels uncertain. A low score describes a system that trusts the response and doesn’t sound the alarm at every silence.

The attachment avoidance axis

This axis measures how uncomfortable you are with a lot of closeness. The statements are about difficulty opening up, a preference for not depending on anyone, discomfort when the other person wants to be very close, and the reflex to pull back when things get intimate. A high score describes a system that cuts the signal to protect itself. A low score describes someone for whom closeness and mutual dependence feel comfortable. Watch out for the trap: high avoidance isn’t calm, it’s an alarm managed through distance.

From two axes to four styles

The four-category model comes from Kim Bartholomew and Leonard Horowitz, in 1991: it crosses your image of yourself (positive or negative) with your image of others. Brennan, Clark, and Shaver showed that these four categories can be found on the two axes. Low anxiety and low avoidance: Secure. High anxiety and low avoidance: Anxious, also called preoccupied. Low anxiety and high avoidance: Avoidant, also called dismissing. High anxiety and high avoidance: Disorganized, also called fearful. But the border between regions is a convention, not a biological reality: someone in the middle of the map is close to two styles at once.

Item response theory

That’s the “R” in ECR-R. Instead of counting how many statements resemble each other, this method looks at at what level of the trait each statement is informative. The 2000 analysis revealed a flaw in the existing scales: they measured very anxious or very avoidant people well, but secure people poorly, for lack of statements that discriminate at the low end of the scale. So Fraley, Waller, and Brennan chose statements spread across the whole continuum. Fraley does acknowledge, though, that precision remains a bit lower on the secure side, and that in practice the ECR and the ECR-R give nearly identical results.

What the research says

A scale is judged on precise criteria: does it measure the same thing from one day to the next, do its two halves hold together, does it predict what it should predict? On these points, the ECR-R is one of the best-documented tools in relationship psychology.

• Internal consistency. The two subscales most often reach a reliability of 0.90 or more, which is very high for a questionnaire of 18 statements.
• Stability. In 2005, a New Zealand team had people retake the ECR-R three weeks apart: scores share 85% of their variance. In other words, the scale measures something stable, not a passing mood.
• French versions. A French version of the ECR was validated in Quebec in 2003, and a French version of the ECR-R was validated in Switzerland in 2016 with 600 adults aged 25 to 45. The two-factor structure holds up, and scores are linked to relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction, and self-esteem.
• Attachment by relationship. In 2011, Fraley and his colleagues derived a short version, the ECR-RS, to be completed separately for your mother, your father, your partner, and a close friend. The result: you can be secure in one relationship and anxious in another. Attachment is partly specific to the relationship.
• No natural categories. Fraley and Waller’s 1998 analyses found no break in the distribution of scores. People don’t sort into separate groups: they spread along a continuum. That’s the best reason to talk about sliders rather than boxes.

Limits and criticisms

The ECR-R is a self-report questionnaire: it measures what you think and say about yourself. But avoidant people tend to downplay their distress, and anxious people to amplify it. That’s partly why the ECR-R and the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), which analyzes how you talk about your childhood, barely overlap: a 2007 review finds a link ranging from none to weak between the two. They don’t measure the same thing, and neither has a monopoly on the truth.

An ECR-R score is a snapshot. It depends on the current relationship, the period you’re in, and what happened last week. The cutoffs that turn two scores into four styles are conventions: research itself works with continuous scores, not labels. The many online “attachment tests” that reuse the 36 statements and hand back a one-word verdict therefore go further than the scale allows.

Finally, the scale was built on American college students. Its translations have to be validated one by one, which has been done in French, but norms vary from one population to another: a “high” score in one sample isn’t necessarily high in another. And the secure end of the scale remains a little less precise, even though that’s exactly the region where you’d like to measure progress.

How MyLoveLab uses it

The MyLoveLab test borrows the logic of the ECR-R without being the ECR-R. It measures your style on the same two axes, with questions about concrete situations rather than general opinions, and gives you the four styles as regions of a map, not as a diagnosis. It’s shorter, it’s part of a test that covers six other dimensions of the relationship, and it isn’t meant for clinical use. The result feeds into the Attachment and security dimension and into your relationship profile. To understand what a couples test can and can’t tell you, read what a couples test is for and the page on the study of 11,196 couples, which shows that how you perceive the relationship predicts its quality better than your individual traits do, attachment included.

Further reading

• Self-report measurement of adult romantic attachment: An integrative overview · Chapter, 1998Brennan, Clark, and Shaver: the chapter that boils every existing scale down to two axes and creates the ECR.
• An item response theory analysis of self-report measures of adult attachment · Article, 2000Fraley, Waller, and Brennan: the article that gives rise to the ECR-R and explains why older scales measured the secure side poorly.
• Experiences in Close Relationships, Revised (ECR-R) (in French: Version française validée par Favez et ses collègues en 2016 (Swiss Journal of Psychology)) · Scale, 2000The scale itself: 36 statements, two scores. Free to use.
• Attachment styles among young adults: A test of a four-category model · Article, 1991Bartholomew and Horowitz: the four-style model that the two axes later absorbed.
• The Experiences in Close Relationships-Relationship Structures questionnaire · Article, 2011The short, relationship-by-relationship version: you can be secure with your partner and anxious with a parent.

Frequently asked questions

References

1. Brennan, K. A., Clark, C. L. & Shaver, P. R. (1998). Self-report measurement of adult romantic attachment: An integrative overview. In J. A. Simpson & W. S. Rholes (dir.), Attachment Theory and Close Relationships (p. 46-76). Guilford.
2. Fraley, R. C., Waller, N. G. & Brennan, K. A. (2000). An item response theory analysis of self-report measures of adult attachment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 350-365.
3. Bartholomew, K. & Horowitz, L. M. (1991). Attachment styles among young adults: A test of a four-category model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61(2), 226-244.
4. Fraley, R. C. & Waller, N. G. (1998). Adult attachment patterns: A test of the typological model. In J. A. Simpson & W. S. Rholes (dir.), Attachment Theory and Close Relationships (p. 77-114). Guilford.
5. Sibley, C. G., Fischer, R. & Liu, J. H. (2005). Reliability and validity of the revised Experiences in Close Relationships (ECR-R) self-report measure of adult romantic attachment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31(11), 1524-1536.
6. Fraley, R. C., Heffernan, M. E., Vicary, A. M. & Brumbaugh, C. C. (2011). The Experiences in Close Relationships-Relationship Structures questionnaire: A method for assessing attachment orientations across relationships. Psychological Assessment, 23(3), 615-625.
7. Favez, N., Tissot, H., Ghisletta, P., Golay, P. & Cairo Notari, S. (2016). Validation of the French version of the Experiences in Close Relationships-Revised (ECR-R) adult romantic attachment questionnaire. Swiss Journal of Psychology, 75(3), 113-121.
8. Roisman, G. I., Holland, A., Fortuna, K., Fraley, R. C., Clausell, E. & Clarke, A. (2007). The Adult Attachment Interview and self-reports of attachment style: An empirical rapprochement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(4), 678-697.

See the full bibliography