Cultural Variations

• Bowlby believed attachments were innate, so the need to form this bond should be genetic and experienced by infants of all cultures. However the kind of attachments may vary in societies depending on child rearing techniques.
• Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg conducted a study to look at proportions of secure, insecure-avoidant and insecure-resistant attachments across countries to assess cultural variation, and differences in the same country. Researchers located 32 studies where Strange Situation was used with 1990 children. These studies were meta-analysed. In all countries secure attachment was most common. In the UK, Sweden, Holland, USA and Germany the percentage of insecure-avoidant was higher than insecure resistant (unlike Japan and Israel) whereas China was equally split.
• The word kibbutz in Hebrew means gathering and is a collective community. In Israel, based on a system where everyone worked for the collective, all children slept together in a separate house away from their parents, and they stayed there most of the time. One woman would watch over them overnight. Kibbutz parents would pick them up after work only to bring them back a few hours later. The reason for this is that it would protect the children from bad upbringing and provide freedom for women and the role of mothering.
• In Germany this study highlights a high percentage of avoidant behaviours, meaning more independent children. Grossmann et al says German parents seek independent, non-clingy children who obey demands. Society encourages distance between parents and children.
• In Japan children show similar patterns of attachment to Israeli children but for different reasons. Japanese children are rarely left by their mothers, so distress when they leave is probably shock. Child rearing appears to be much higher value and there is emphasis on developing close family relationships.
• A strength in this cross-cultural research is indigenous researchers (from same cultural background as participant) so difficulties like language barriers or bias from stereotypes are avoided, which increases validity of the data.
• However, not all cross-cultural research (e.g Morelli and Tronick) used indigenous researchers. So data may not be completely valid.
• One limitation of cross-cultural research is the impact of confounding variables. Environmental variables might also differ between studies and confound results. This means behaviour in non-matched studies in other countries may not tell us anything about cross-cultural patterns of attachment.
• Another limitation of cross-cultural research is trying to impose a test designed for one cultural context to another. This research includes ideas of emic (cultural uniqueness) and etic (cross-cultural universality). Imposed etic occurs when an imposed idea or technique works in one cultural context but is different in another (E.g. results from the strange situation study may imply different things depending on different societies, like Germany compared to the USA).
• Cross-cultural research has found similar results in different countries, which bowlby explained by identifying attachment as innate and universal. However Llzendoorn and Kroonenberg suggest that global media represents a view of how parents should behave which may override tradition cultural differences in raisning children.