The adult attachment prototypes of student-teachers of HKIEd and their implications in teacher education programme

The study using the four-category model (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991) seeks to classity Chinese people into four adult attachment prototypes: Secure, dismissing, preoccupied and fearful. It also assesses the impact of attachment styles on self-esteem, loneliness, and causal attribution to classroom events. Two hundred and twenty-five student-teachers of mean age 21 years participated in the study by completing the self-reported Attachment Style Inventory, Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale, Revised UCLA Eoneliness Scale and the Attributional Style Questionnaire. Only about half of the subjects were identified as secure (46.9%), whereas the other half split evently between the dismissing (28.2%) and preoccupied (21.1%) categories. Very few were classified as fearful (3.8%). Findings indicated that subjects of the preoccupied, dismissing, and fearful attachment had lower self-esteem and more lonely than the secure counterparts. Both secure and dismissing groups were found to have significantly higher self-esteem than the preoccupied group. Fearful group was found to be the most lonely, followed by the preoccupied and then the dismissing. The least lonely was the secure group. Significant differences in attributional styles were also found between high self-esteem group and low self-esteem group. However, the impact of attachment styles on attributional pattern was not so obvious. The results suggest that the four attachment prototypes can be found in Chinese people and the quality of adult attachment can have some influence on one' s social functioning. Implications for planning teacher education curriculum for pre-service prospective teachers were also discussed.