Like the Parent Development Interview (PDI), the Pregnancy Interview (PI: Slade, Grunebaum, Huganir, & Reeves, 1987; Slade, 2003) is a semi-structured clinical interview that has been shown to predict to adult attachment classification. It has 39 questions and probes and was developed to assess the quality of a mother’s representation of her relationship with her unborn child. The interview, which is administered during the third trimester, assesses a variety of aspects of the mother’s view of her emotional experience with pregnancy and her expectations and fantasies regarding her future relationship with her child. Mothers are asked about emotionally difficult moments during their pregnancy, how their relationship with their own mothers has changed since becoming pregnant, and lifestyle changes they have made while pregnant.

Many questions on the PI tap into the mother’s pre-natal representations of her fetus. For instance, the mother is asked to describe her current relationship to the fetus as well as what she imagines her baby will be like. In addition, the interview aims to capture the mother’s pre-natal representations of herself as a caregiver, focusing in particular on the mother’s capacity to identify with, respond to, and anticipate the needs of her fetus at present and her newborn in the near future.