The Attachment Style Interview (ASI): a Support-Based Adult Assessment Tool for Adoption and Fostering Practice (Report‪)‬

Introduction The need for evidence-based approaches to health and social care has become a central tenet of government policy in order to ensure consistency, transparency and effective interventions. Part of this process involves the use of assessment tools in order to identify, categorise and analyse issues around risk, as well as to identify accurately the positive or protective factors that aid resilience in resisting adverse effects or aiding recovery. The use of such tools has the added benefit of improving communication between professionals through the use of specified risk or resilience labels and the possibility of identifying their presence in a way that facilitates quantitative analysis of the effectiveness of interventions. The use of standardised assessment in adoption and fostering is key to the accurate identification of the characteristics of prospective carers that provide stronger predictions of future placement stability and the identification of post-placement support needed to underpin it (Department for Education and Skills, 2006--now Department for Children, Schools and Families).