About Story Stems
The Story Stem Assessment Profile (SSAP) asks children to respond to a set of narrative story stems. Here, they are given the beginning of a 'story' highlighting everyday scenarios with an inherent dilemma and are then asked to 'show and tell me what happens next?'
This allows some assessment of the child's expectations and perceptions of family roles, attachments and relationships, without asking the child direct questions about their family which might cause them conflict or anxiety.
Story Stem Standardisation Project
The SSAP is a clinical and research assessment tool which is a technique specifically for use with clinical and maltreatment populations. It has proved a valuable and non-intrusive tool for examining young children's mental representations of attachment and relationships, both in research and in clinical practice.
Normally, it is best used with children aged between about 4 and 9 years.
The set of story stems includes ones developed by Jill Hodges as part of her work at the Child Care Consultation team at Great Ormond Street Hospital.
The full story stem battery includes a core set formulated by workers in developmental psychology interested in aspects of children mental representations of self and the important 'others' with whom they relate. These originate from the MacArthur Foundation Network on Childhood Narratives headed by Professor Robert Emde.
Previous research has shown that children's responses to these story stems reflect both current and past features of their family life and attachment histories.
The technique allows the child's attachment representations to be evidenced in a displaced way, which is usually enjoyed by the child and not experienced as unduly threatening.
Children enjoy the assessment, which draws on their natural mode of self-expression through representational play. There are no right or wrong answers. The child's narratives are then transcribed and rated on a standardised and validated coding system.
The assessment generally lasts between 45 minutes and 1 hour. Trained postgraduate researchers will administer the SSAP.
We are in the midst of collecting SSAP data on a sample of 120 children aged between 4 and 8, attending mainstream schools. The sample will be balanced for gender, urban/rural environment, and age group.
The sample excludes children who are referred to clinical services for behavioural or emotional problems, are known to have been maltreated, or who have not always lived with at least one of their birth parents. The assessments can take place in the family's home, at the Anna Freud Centre or in schools.
The assessment is video-taped and consists of the SSAP, a non-intrusive task, where the children are not asked about themselves or their families, but instead are asked to show and tell what they imagine could happen to the story family in response to the different story stems.
The study will help to establish baseline measurements for individual SSAP assessments. It will also be helpful in establishing the psychometric properties of the story stem method, including its internal consistency.
It will also be useful in examining the relationships of the SSAP with other measures for this normative sample.
Furthermore, we aim to compare these new data on a low-risk 'normal' group with other samples of maltreated and clinically referred children.
Click here to read about the Anna Freud Centre's short course in Story Stem Assessment Profile (SSAP) Training.