Cultural variation

• Vanijzendoorn and Kroonberg conducted a meta analysis combining the findings of 32 other studies of the SSP from 8 different countries. This involved nearly 2000 classifications of infants using the SSP.

  75% British securely attached and 50% China.
• Germany has a high percentage of avoidant attachments.

  Israel - 29%

  Japan - 27%

  China - 25% all had a much higher than normal percentage of resistant. Insecure avoidant was the next most common in every country except Israel and Japan which are collectivist cultures.
• In Japan, the society has the concept of amae, which means that before the infant turns 1, the infant will be highly dependent on the caregiver and rarely leaves their side. 27% children were classified as type C which involves extreme emotional reactions in the SSP.

  This is not surprising as these children rarely leave their parents and so this classification is likely to be invalid as it uses a Western scoring system.
• The avoidant nature of the children was attributed to the fact that independence was highly valued by German parents and early self reliance was encouraged before their first birthday.
• In Israel, children were not used to strangers and so get distressed when left alone with the stranger which explains the high percentage of resistant behaviour.
• A03

  The SSP may not be a universal measure that can be used in all cultures.

  • developed in the Western world and can lead to the wrong classifications of some children in other cultures, e.g. Japan where children found separation stages to be very stressful.

  Thus the SSP is an imposed etic.
• A03

  Simonelli et al

  • conducted research in Italy and found that Type B 50% and type A - 36%
  • the researchers postulated that this was due to the increasing number of mothers of very young children working long hours and using childcare

  Thus showing how results can vary in line with social change
• A03

  The universal claim of secure attachment being the most common type made by Vanijzendoorn is not true as he did not include any studies from South America or Africa.

  Thus more cross cultural research is needed in all continents.
• A03

  A strength is that most of the studies were conducted using indigenous researchers for e.g. Grossman et al in Germany & Takahshi in Japan.

  This is a strength as it can overcome the problems with communication and any language barriers.

  It also prevents one country of using their stereotypes of another.

  This therefore enhances the validity of their findings.