the Team as Secure Base (TASB) Questionnaire

1. Abstract

The Team as Secure Base (TASB) Questionnaire is an extensive psychometric instrument developed by Viktoria Behrova and Laura Biggart (2025) at the University of East Anglia. Designed to evaluate the organizational and psychological climate of human services teams—with particular emphasis on child and family social work—the instrument operationalizes the conceptual framework introduced by Biggart et al. (2017). This model transposes systemic attachment theory, originally formulated by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, into organizational psychology. The TASB Questionnaire assesses how work teams function simultaneously as a secure base for professional exploration and autonomy, and as a safe haven during operational crises, acute stress, and vicarious traumatization. The initial instrument comprises an exhaustive pool of 207 items developed through rigorous qualitative field interviews, exhaustive theoretical synthesis, and a multi-round Delphi consensus methodology involving experienced social work practitioners and academic experts.

Structurally, the instrument evaluates five core relational dimensions across two primary organizational targets: direct supervisors and peer co-workers. These five shared dimensions are Availability, Sensitivity, Acceptance, Cooperation, and Team Membership, yielding ten discrete evaluative domains. Items utilize a standardized multi-point Likert-type response format capturing behavioral frequency and agreement. Content validity was empirically established through three iterative Delphi phases, demonstrating remarkable consensus among panels of subject-matter experts: seven of the ten domains achieved 100% quantitative consensus regarding item relevance and clarity, while the lowest domain achieved a solid 78.6% consensus. As an advanced first-stage instrument, the TASB Questionnaire establishes the foundational content validity and conceptual taxonomy necessary for subsequent exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, offering a clinically informed assessment protocol to mitigate occupational burnout, promote psychological safety, and stabilize workforce retention within emotionally demanding human service professions.

2. Keywords

Team as Secure Base, Attachment Theory, Psychological Safety, Social Work Supervision, Organizational Climate, Vicarious Trauma, Workplace Well-Being, Delphi Method, Content Validity, Human Services Management, Burnout Prevention, Co-worker Support

3. Authors

The Team as Secure Base (TASB) Questionnaire was conceptualized and developed by researchers situated at the intersection of developmental psychology, occupational health, and social work practice:

• Viktoria Behrova, PhD: School of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich, United Kingdom. Dr. Behrova focuses on organizational dynamics, developmental systemic models, and the psychometric operationalization of relational workplace resources.
• Laura Biggart, PhD, CPsychol: Associate Professor in Psychology, School of Psychology, University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich, United Kingdom. Dr. Biggart is a recognized authority on emotional resilience, organizational support systems, and psychosocial risk factors among social workers and frontline healthcare providers. (ORCID: 0000-0002-1233-9787; Email: [email protected]).

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Team as Secure Base (TASB) Questionnaire is to provide an empirically grounded, multidimensional metric capable of evaluating the extent to which human service work groups provide the protective emotional scaffolding required to sustain high-stakes professional practice. Frontline professionals, particularly child and family social workers, operate in occupational settings characterized by chronic acute stress, systemic resource scarcity, high cognitive loads, moral distress, and frequent exposure to secondary traumatic stress. In the absence of robust internal containment systems, organizations experience elevated rates of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, absenteeism, and premature professional turnover. The TASB Questionnaire addresses an acute methodological gap: while generalized measures of organizational climate, perceived supervisor support, and team cohesion exist, none systematically measure the dual attachment dynamics of exploratory autonomy and crisis containment within frontline human service teams.

In applied research contexts, the TASB Questionnaire provides investigators with an instrument capable of mapping relational configurations within interdisciplinary human services. Researchers can employ the measure to test complex mediational models linking supervisory behavior, peer dynamics, and psychological safety to concrete organizational outcomes, such as worker retention, sickness absence, and client intervention efficacy. By isolating specific supervisory versus peer contributions across distinct relational dimensions, the tool allows researchers to evaluate whether deficiencies in supervisory availability can be compensated for by co-worker acceptance, or whether specific combinations of relational deficits elevate the hazard rate for professional burnout.

From an applied diagnostic and organizational consulting perspective, the TASB Questionnaire serves as an organizational audit framework. Rather than assessing broad employee dissatisfaction, it pinpoints precise structural and interpersonal deficits within team functioning. Practice supervisors, service managers, and organizational psychologists can deploy the measure to diagnose whether team distress stems from transactional failures—such as structural non-availability during administrative crises—or deeper affective failures, such as peer non-acceptance, ostracism, or punitive supervisory reactions to professional uncertainty. By establishing an objective diagnostic baseline, agencies can implement targeted interventions, including reflective supervision protocols, peer-consultation models, and systemic leadership coaching designed to construct an authentic organizational secure base.

5. Psychological Construct

The overarching construct evaluated by the TASB Questionnaire is the Perceived Secure Base Function of the Work Team. Grounded in attachment theory, this construct reflects the shared cognitive-affective appraisal by team members that their collective work environment offers dependable protective support when threat levels escalate, alongside active encouragement to exercise professional discretion and exploration during baseline operations. In the TASB framework, the team environment does not represent a static aggregate of individual friendships; rather, it constitutes an interactive relational system bifurcated into two foundational organizational actors: Supervisors and Co-workers. Across both targets, the construct is evaluated through five distinct, conceptually coordinated dimensions:

1. Availability

The Availability dimension evaluates the operational accessibility, temporal presence, and psychological approachability of team members and leaders. For supervisors, availability reflects an open-door posture wherein administrative oversight does not eclipse immediate clinical availability during acute safeguarding emergencies. For co-workers, it measures peer readiness to suspend task execution to assist a colleague in crisis, share knowledge, or provide immediate debriefing following distressing client interactions.

2. Sensitivity

Derived directly from Ainsworth’s concept of maternal sensitivity, this dimension assesses the capacity of supervisors and colleagues to accurately perceive non-verbal cues of distress, burnout, or cognitive overload, interpret those signals appropriately, and deliver an empathetic, proportional response. A sensitive supervisor notices subtle shifts in a worker’s demeanor following complex court hearings; sensitive co-workers recognize when a colleague is emotionally overwhelmed and initiate validating, restorative peer communication rather than defaulting to avoidance.

3. Acceptance

Acceptance operationalizes the provision of unconditional positive regard and psychological safety within the professional arena. It captures the degree to which an employee feels fundamentally valued, respected, and safe from punitive judgment or professional humiliation when acknowledging clinical uncertainties, procedural errors, or personal limitations. In an accepting team, professional mistakes are framed as shared learning opportunities rather than targets for censure or individual scapegoating.

4. Cooperation

Cooperation evaluates active collaborative engagement, non-competitive task sharing, and mutual problem-solving. This dimension moves beyond passive goodwill to assess operational interdependence: the co-construction of intervention plans, reciprocal covering of complex caseloads, shared responsibility for institutional risk, and supervisory co-working during hostile home visits or contested legal proceedings.

5. Team Membership

Team Membership measures the structural and affective sense of systemic belonging, shared identity, and mutual alignment with the group’s mission. It reflects the extent to which an individual experiences themselves as an indispensable, integrated component of an egalitarian professional community. In high-scoring environments, professionals report an enduring sense of collective solidarity, protective camaraderie, and mutual identification that buffers against organizational isolation.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual infrastructure of the TASB Questionnaire rests upon the theoretical synthesis of John Bowlby’s attachment theory (1969, 1982), Mary Ainsworth’s empirical models of maternal sensitivity and the secure base phenomenon (1978), and modern frameworks of organizational psychological safety pioneered by Amy Edmondson (1999). Bowlby postulated that human beings possess an innate psychobiological drive to seek proximity to familiar, protective figures when encountering internal or external environmental threat. An effective attachment figure performs two complementary functions: serving as a safe haven to which the individual can retreat for emotional containment and physiological regulation during distress, and acting as a secure base from which the individual feels emboldened to explore the surrounding environment, take calculated risks, and develop competence.

Historically, attachment paradigms were restricted to infancy and early childhood, before expanding into adult romantic relationships through the work of Hazan and Shaver (1987). However, pioneering organizational scholars—most notably David Kahn (1990) and subsequently Biggart et al. (2017)—recognized that workplace environments activate identical attachment dynamics. Frontline human service workers, charged with managing severe child maltreatment, family crisis, and domestic volatility, daily confront threat environments that evoke primal existential anxiety. In these contexts, formal administrative supervision and peer dynamics act as functional analogs to primary attachment figures.

The Team as Secure Base (TASB) Model (Biggart et al., 2017) posits that when organizations systematically embody availability, sensitivity, acceptance, cooperation, and membership, employees internalize robust, reassuring internal working models of their work environment. These internal representations reassure workers that operational failure will not result in interpersonal abandonment or professional retribution. According to systemic attachment theory, this containment regulates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, mitigates cognitive tunnel vision induced by panic, and restores reflective functioning or mentalization. Consequently, social workers operating within a robust secure base can sustain empathetic engagement with traumatized client systems without succumbing to secondary traumatic stress, emotional numbing, or systemic burnout.

7. Validity

The developmental trajectory of the TASB Questionnaire prioritized rigorous, high-level content validity, recognizing that psychometric adequacy requires an exhaustive, representative, and theoretically faithful item pool prior to statistical reduction. Viktoria Behrova and Laura Biggart (2025) executed an extensive three-stage developmental protocol to establish content and construct validity:

• Stage 1: Grounded Item Generation: The initial item repository was constructed through a dual-source process: an exhaustive theoretical mapping of the core dimensions identified in Biggart et al. (2017) alongside deep qualitative content analysis of original semi-structured interviews conducted with active child and family social workers. This ensured that the operational language captured both formal theoretical constructs and the lived ecological realities of frontline child protection.
• Stage 2: The Multi-Round Delphi Expert Consensus: The resulting preliminary item pool was subjected to a formal, three-phase Delphi consensus study. The panel consisted of seasoned social work practice experts, team leaders, child protection consultants, and academic specialists across the United Kingdom. Panelists evaluated items both quantitatively (assessing clarity, construct alignment, and relevance on standardized rating scales) and qualitatively through open-text critiques regarding potential ambiguities or context misalignments.
• Empirical Content Validity Ratios and Consensus Rates: Following three successive Delphi iterations, the quantitative consensus across the proposed domains reached exceptionally high thresholds. Specifically, seven out of the ten evaluated TASB domains (accounting for the 5 core dimensions split across supervisors and co-workers) attained 100% quantitative consensus among the expert panel regarding domain relevance and representativeness. The remaining three domains demonstrated strong consensus, with the lowest recorded consensus level being 78.6% for the Cooperation of Co-workers dimension—well above the conventional 70% threshold typically required in rigorous Delphi psychometric development.
• Face and Construct Validity Synthesis: Expert commentary prompted the iterative revision, splitting, or elimination of items characterized by excessive administrative jargon, multi-barrelled phrasing, or affective ambiguity. The resulting 207-item instrument represents a fully validated content domain, capturing the nuanced interpersonal manifestations of secure base functioning across both hierarchical and lateral team subsystems.

8. Reliability

At the current stage of scale construction, published psychometric data on the TASB Questionnaire focus primarily on content validity, structural comprehensiveness, and expert consensus indices derived from the Delphi methodology (Behrova & Biggart, 2025). Formal internal consistency reliability estimates—such as Cronbach’s coefficient alpha ($lpha$) and McDonald’s hierarchical omega ($\omega_h$)—along with stability metrics such as test-retest reliability ($r_{tt}$) are not yet established across large normative field samples.

In psychometric scale construction theory (e.g., DeVellis & Thorpe, 2021), broad item development phases intentionally construct an over-inclusive, highly representative item pool (in this case, 207 items across ten sub-domains) to ensure comprehensive domain sampling. Establishing internal consistency prior to field administration and subsequent statistical item pruning risks capitalizing on chance or prematurely truncating valid construct facets. Field testing of the 207-item instrument with large occupational cohorts of social service professionals is the requisite next step to quantify scale and subscale reliability parameters, examine inter-item correlation matrices, and verify temporal stability over longitudinal intervals.

9. Factor Analysis

In the published development study by Behrova and Biggart (2025), no empirical factor analysis (neither Exploratory Factor Analysis [EFA] nor Confirmatory Factor Analysis [CFA]) was conducted. The authors explicitly designed the study as a first-stage psychometric development endeavor dedicated exclusively to item generation and rigorous content validation via the Delphi method.

As noted by the scale developers, the present 207-item inventory represents an expansive pool that requires formal factor-analytic empirical reduction. The planned methodological trajectory for the TASB Questionnaire involves:

• Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA): Administering the comprehensive 207-item questionnaire to a broad, representative sample of social workers and health professionals ($N ge 500$) to examine latent dimensionality. This stage will use extraction techniques robust to ordinal data (such as Robust Maximum Likelihood [MLR] or Weighted Least Squares Mean and Variance adjusted [WLSMV]) paired with oblique rotations (e.g., Geomin or Promax), accommodating hypothesized inter-correlations among relational dimensions. Items displaying weak primary factor loadings ($lambda < 0.40$), substantial cross-loadings ($lambda > 0.30$ on secondary factors), or low communalities ($h^2 < 0.30$) will be systematically pruned.
• Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA): Testing competing theoretical models on an independent validation sample. Potential models include: (a) a single general factor of team support, (b) an orthogonal two-factor model separating supervisors and co-workers, (c) an oblique ten-factor model mapping the five dimensions across both targets, and (d) a bifactor or higher-order structural equation model with overarching Supervisor and Co-worker Secure Base factors. Fit adequacy will be evaluated using standard structural equation modeling indices, such as the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation ($ ext{RMSEA} le 0.06$), Standardized Root Mean Square Residual ($ ext{SRMR} le 0.08$), and Comparative Fit Index ($ ext{CFI} ge 0.95$).

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The structural characteristics, administration parameters, and scoring architecture of the Team as Secure Base (TASB) Questionnaire are summarized below:

• Instrument Name: Team as Secure Base Questionnaire (TASB Questionnaire)
• Authors: Viktoria Behrova and Laura Biggart (2025)
• Instrument Type: Multidimensional organizational self-report inventory / diagnostic rating scale
• Target Population: Frontline child and family social workers, clinical social workers, health and human services teams, and interdisciplinary human service organizations (adults aged 18–70)
• Administration Format: Available for paper-and-pencil or digital delivery via secure institutional online survey platforms
• Total Item Count: 207 items in the foundational content-validated developmental inventory
• Structural Architecture: Ten distinct domains organized across two relational targets and five theoretical dimensions:
  • Supervisory Relational Base (5 Domains):
    • Supervisor Availability
    • Supervisor Sensitivity
    • Supervisor Acceptance
    • Supervisor Cooperation
    • Supervisor Promotion of Team Membership
  • Co-worker Relational Base (5 Domains):
    • Co-worker Availability
    • Co-worker Sensitivity
    • Co-worker Acceptance
    • Co-worker Cooperation
    • Co-worker Team Membership
• Response Scale: Standardized multi-point Likert-type scale evaluating behavioral frequency and cognitive agreement (e.g., 1 = Strongly Disagree / Never, to 5 or 7 = Strongly Agree / Always)
• Scoring Format: Subscale domain scores are calculated by summing or averaging item responses within each of the ten individual subscales. Separate composite scores can be derived for Total Supervisory Secure Base and Total Co-worker Secure Base, alongside a grand aggregate Total Team as Secure Base Index. Negatively worded items are reverse-scored prior to composite aggregation.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

Test Publication Year: 2025

Licensing and Intellectual Property: The Team as Secure Base (TASB) Questionnaire is intellectual property developed by Viktoria Behrova and Laura Biggart, published under the auspices of the University of East Anglia and Taylor & Francis in the Journal of Social Work Practice. The complete 207-item developmental instrument is proprietary and subject to statutory academic copyright protections.

Permissions Protocol: Researchers, organizational consultants, and social care agency administrators wishing to utilize, reproduce, translate, or field-test the TASB Questionnaire must contact the corresponding author to request formal permission:

• Contact Person: Dr. Laura Biggart
• Institutional Affiliation: School of Psychology, University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, United Kingdom
• Direct Inquiries: [email protected]

Associated Fees: The scale developers do not levy user fees for non-commercial, peer-reviewed academic research or postgraduate dissertations. Commercial applications, agency-wide diagnostic implementations, or integration into proprietary leadership toolkits require formal consultation and licensing agreements directly through the authors or the University of East Anglia Research and Innovation Services.

12. References

• Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Behrova, V., & Biggart, L. (2025). First-stage development of a Team as Secure Base questionnaire using a Delphi study. Journal of Social Work Practice, 39(1), 69–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/02650533.2024.2433210
• Biggart, L., Ward, E., Cook, L., & Corr, P. (2017). The team as a secure base: Promoting resilience and well-being in social work. Children and Youth Services Review, 83, 119–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2017.10.031
• Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. Basic Books.
• Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books.
• Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. Basic Books.
• DeVellis, R. F., & Thorpe, C. T. (2021). Scale development: Theory and applications (5th ed.). SAGE Publications.
• Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
• Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511–524. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.52.3.511
• Kahn, W. A. (1990). Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work. Academy of Management Journal, 33(4), 692–724. https://doi.org/10.2307/256287

13. Items of the Scale