The ECR-R is a specific, twice-refined questionnaire — not a general label for "an attachment quiz." Two revisions produced it: one to find the right two dimensions, a second to measure those two dimensions more precisely. Bearing's Relationships branch is adapted directly from it.
Finding the two dimensions
Adult attachment research didn't start with two clean dimensions — it started with a scattered set of separate scales, each researcher measuring something adjacent but not identical. Brennan, Clark, and Shaver's 1998 contribution was consolidating that scatter: factor-analyzing item pools from many existing attachment measures and finding that most of the variation collapsed cleanly into two underlying dimensions — anxiety (worry about whether a close relationship is secure) and avoidance (discomfort with closeness itself). That work produced the original ECR, a 36-item, two-dimension instrument built from combining and refining what earlier scales had measured separately.
Refining how well those two dimensions get measured
Finding the right two dimensions and measuring them precisely are different problems. Fraley, Waller, and Brennan's 2000 follow-up applied item response theory — a statistical approach that evaluates how much information each individual item contributes across the full range of a trait, not just on average — to re-select and refine the ECR's items. The result, the ECR-R, keeps the same two-dimension structure but measures it with items chosen specifically for better precision at the edges of each scale, not just near the middle. That's the specific contribution the "R" represents: not a new theory, a better-calibrated instrument for the same one.
How Bearing adapted it
The full ECR-R runs 36 items, 18 per dimension. Bearing's Relationships branch uses 15 — 7 for anxiety, 8 for avoidance — the same kind of length tradeoff the IPIP-NEO-120 makes against the full 300-item IPIP-NEO: shorter completion time in exchange for some of the full instrument's precision, calibrated toward giving a reliable read on both dimensions rather than the strongest possible one. The two scores place someone on both dimensions independently, and Bearing maps the combination to one of four named patterns — covered in more depth in why you might keep dating the same type of person — rather than stopping at the raw anxiety and avoidance numbers.
What it isn't
The ECR-R doesn't diagnose an attachment disorder, and it isn't a clinical instrument — it's a self-report style measure, in the same category as a Big Five facet score, not a tool requiring clinical interpretation. And the familiar four labels (secure, anxious, avoidant, fearful) aren't a separate thing the instrument measures — they're one way of naming a position on the same two dimensions the ECR-R outputs directly, not additional information beyond them.
Bearing's Relationships branch runs 15 items adapted from the ECR-R and scores both dimensions independently, mapping the result to one of four named patterns rather than stopping at two raw numbers.
Sources: Brennan, K. A., Clark, C. L., & Shaver, P. R. (1998). Self-report measurement of adult attachment: An integrative overview. In J. A. Simpson & W. S. Rholes (Eds.), Attachment Theory and Close Relationships (pp. 46–76). Guilford Press. Fraley, R. C., Waller, N. G., & Brennan, K. A. (2000). An item response theory analysis of self-report measures of adult attachment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 350–365.