Cultural Variations - Ijzendoorn

• Culture - rules, social norms and expectations within a society
• Collectivist cultures

  Focused on groups, shared home and child care, value interdependence, and work as a collective

  (Israel and Japan are more collectivist)
• Individualist cultures

  Value independence, individual achievements, Autonomy (More western countries)
• Ijzendoorn and Krooneberg (1988) - Aim

  To find out if inter-cultural and intra-cultural differences do exist
• Ijzendoorn and Krooneberg (1988) - Procedure

  Meta-analysis of the findings of 32 studies of attachment behaviour in 8 countries

  Examined over 2000 strange situation classifications of attachment
• Ijzendoorn and Krooneberg (1988) - Findings

  Secure attachment was the common classification in every country

  Insecure avoidant was the next most common, except japan and Israel

  Supports the notion that secure attachment is ‘best’ for healthy social and emotional development

  These cultural similarities also support the view attachment could be innate and biological
• Limitation - Ethnocentricity

  The behavioural categories of the infants all over the world are classified due to the western, American norms and values
• Limitation - findings were distorted

  As the majority of the studies (18/32) were carried out in America, the overall findings would have been distorted
• Strength - Comparison is aided by the standardised methodology

  The use of the strange situation as a procedure means that a comparison can be made across cultures, and reliability is therefore high
• Strength - large samples

  Increased internal validity as it reduces the impact of anomalous results caused by bad methodology or abnormal variables