Strange Situation; Types of Attachment; Cultural Variations in Attachment Flashcards
(12 cards)
What did Ainsworth investigate?
What did she find?
Attachment types between babies and their mothers by using 100 middle class American families and observing the babies’ reaction to strangers, separation from mother and behaviour on reunion
66% were classified as having secure attachments, 22% had insecure-avoidant attachments and 12% had insecure-resistant attachments
What were the 7 steps used in the Strange Situation and what behaviours were they looking at?
- Parent and infant enter room and infant explores (parent as secure base)
- Stranger enters room (stranger anxiety)
- Parent leaves (separation anxiety)
- Parent returns and stranger leaves (pleasure on reunion)
- Parent leaves (separation anxiety)
- Stranger enters (stranger anxiety)
- Parent enters (pleasure on reunion)
What is a secure (type B) attachment?
What is the mother described as?
Baby uses mother as a secure base to explore, and demonstrates some separation anxiety and is wary of a stranger but can be easily comforted
Mother was sensitive
What is an insecure-avoidant (type A) attachment?
What is the mother described as?
Baby explores whether mother is present or not, and does not appear to care when mother leaves or stranger enters
Mother was unresponsive/ignoring
What is an insecure-resistant (type C) attachment?
What is the mother described as?
Baby will not explore, and shows extreme separation anxiety and stranger anxiety and cannot be comforted
Mother was inconsistent
What are 2 strengths of Ainsworth’s Strange Situation?
- It has high inter-observer reliability, showing that the findings are consistent
- It has practical applications such as the Circle of Security Project which teaches parents to better understand children’s needs
What are 3 limitations of Ainsworth’s Strange Situation?
- It only used middle-class American mothers and their babies so the results are not generalisable to other cultures
- It used an overt observation so the mothers may have shown demand characteristics to appear more sensitive Which would then mean their classification is wrong
- Main & Weston found another attachment type where the children lacked any consistent pattern, meaning Ainsworth’s results may lack validity
What did Van Ijzendoorn investigate?
What did he find?
Cultural variations in attachments by conducting a meta-analysis where 2000 Strange Situations were used from 8 countries
Differences between countries were minimal but differences within countries were more profound 1.5x greater). Secure attachments were most common in all countries, insecure-avoidant was next most common (highest percentage of these in West Germany) except for in Israel and Japan where insecure-resistant was next highest
What was found in Japan about attachment type?
60 Japanese middle-class mothers and their children were observed using the Strange Situations where it was found that secure was most common (68% - similar to USA) but more children had insecure-resistant attachments (32%) and no children had insecure-avoidant attachments - baby alone step had to be stopped in 90% of cases because baby was so distressed
What was found in Germany about attachment type?
The Strange Situation showed 51% had secure attachments and 35% had insecure-avoidant attachments
What is a strength of research into cultural variations in attachments?
It had a large sample size meaning the effect of anomalies was reduced so the results are more generalisable
What are 3 limitations of research into cultural variations in attachments?
- Research is culturally biased because it focuses on individualist cultures rather than collectivist cultures (where the emphasis is on community not independence)
- Research looked for differences between countries not cultures as one county could have many different cultures in it
- It only researched 8 countries and off the 32 studies, 18 were from the USA meaning the results are not very representative
