Assessment of Representational Risk on the Parent Development Interview

About this course

Training Outline

Interviews such as the Parent Development Interview (PDI, Slade et al, 2004) that tap into parents’ representations of their child, themselves as parents, and the parent-child relationship can provide rich and meaningful information about the quality of the attachment relationship between a child and their caregiver. This training will compliment the Reflective Functioning (RF) on the PDI course. 

The PDI RF coding system provides one method of assessing the quality of how parents think and talk about their relationship with their child, i.e. the mentalizing capacity.  

However, the PDI can be used to assess other clinically relevant aspects of parental representations which are complex and multifaceted.

The aim of this course will be to provide participants with a broader multidimensional view on some of the other current theoretical and empirical ideas around the assessment of parental representations. 

This will enable practitioners to further their understanding of, and capacity to assess:

• A broad range of parental states of mind in relation to their child
• Parental states of mind that predict relational disturbances, many of which are often under-recognised.
• The relationship between parental states of mind and arousal, mentalization and affect regulation
• Parental representations that can serve as starting points for intervention 

The training will provide a theoretical overview of the features of parental representations that are associated with risk and resilience in the parent-child relationship.

Trainees will then be introduced to a coding system that can be used to assess these features in PDI transcripts, the “Assessment of Representational Risk” (ARR). The system has been used in coding e.g. clinical, prison, war traumatized, and substance-abusing samples of mothers, and has been found to be very helpful and informative in these (high) risk samples.