Types of attachment

• Ainsworth was investigating how willing the infants were to explore, how the infant reacted to

  the stranger, how the infant reacted to being left alone, and on reunion with the mother.
• Strange situation


  Ainsworth observed the behaviour of infants in a standardised room created in a lab, in

  response to a series of different situations e.g

  • stranger entering the room
  • mother leaving the infant with the stranger
  • mother entering and stranger leaving
  • mother leaving
  • stranger entering
  • mother returning and stranger leaving
• Results showed that:

  70% secure

  15% insecure avoidant

  15% insecure resistant
• It assumes mother is the primary attachment figure. This is because the study only uses

  mothers in the situations and Ignores the possibility of the father being the primary attachment

  figure and so the study could wrongly assign an infant as insecure but in actual fact it is

  securely attached to their father.
• (-) Strange situation may not apply to other cultures as it assigns children different attachment

  types based on western ideas of what is considered normal infant behaviour.

  E.g in German cultures insecure avoidant behaviour is considered much more normal as

  children are encouraged to be independent from a young age.
• Cultural variations in attachment


  Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg carried out a meta analysis of 32 studies of the strange situation across many different countries, looking for any overall patterns.
• found that there were cross-cultural similarities in that across all cultures the percentages of securely attached infants and insecurely attached infants was similar. With secure being the most common attachment type accounting for about 70%. However there were differences in the proportion of insecurely attached infants between cultures
• However there were differences in the proportion of insecurely attached infants between cultures. In western cultures the more common type of insecure attachment type was avoidant, with the highest proportion for this coming from Germany.
• why was this the case in Germany

  because the parents often encourage children to be independent at a very young age. Whereas in eastern cultures the 24 more common insecure attachment type was insecure resistant, with the highest proportion of this coming from japan.
• They concluded that there were cross cultural similarities in attachment types, with common reactions to the strange situation
• However, the findings could be questioned if the method

  uses the strange situation which is developed around western ideas of attachment. Therefore if

  a different study was used the meta analysis may reveal different patterns and

  attachment types
• Furthermore the study assumes that different countries are the same thing as different cultures, where in actual fact there may be thousands of different sub cultures within one country, meaning more differences could be found within a country than between different ones.
• Finally because it was a meta analysis, any anomalous findings could have been ignored if they went against the overall pattern.