The 10-Item Short Form of the German Experiences in Close Relationships Scale (ECR-G-10)—Model Fit, Reliability, and Validity

Abstract

The aim of the present work was the development and validation of a short form of the Experiences in Close Relationship Scale (ECR) in German. Three studies were conducted. In study 1, the best items for the short form were selected from the item pool of the original version based on ant colony optimization (ACO), a recently developed probabilistic approach. Data from three samples collected at a university, an online portal, and a psychosomatic clinic with a total of 1470 participants were analyzed. A 10-item solution resulted, measuring avoidance and anxiety with five items each. This solution showed a good model fit and acceptable reliability in all three samples. The two new short scales were independent of each other. In study 2, the 10-item solution was validated by correlating the new short scales with external criteria. Data from previous studies that included student, community, and clinical samples were reanalyzed. Both short scales showed expected correlations with measures of romantic relationships, personality, psychopathology, and childhood trauma, indicating convergent and discriminant validity. The significant correlations were moderate to strong. In study 3, the selected ten items alone and several content-related scales were presented online to 277 participants, most of them students. The good results in terms of model fit, reliability, and validity observed in studies 1 and 2 could be replicated here. The new short form, called ECR-G-10, allows the measurement of attachment avoidance and anxiety in an economic way in research and clinical practice.

Keywords

• adult attachment
• avoidance
• anxiety
• experiences in close relationships scale
• ant colony optimization