Explanations of attachment

• Schaffer and Emerson’s stages of attachment are:

  asocial, indiscriminate, specific and multiple.
• Glasgow infants study procedure: longitudinal study: 60 Glasgow infants from working-class households were observed, visited monthly for a year. Mothers were asked to keep a diary of the infant’s response to separation is seven different situations.
• what did Schaffer and Emerson conclude to be the most important factor in formation of primary attachments?

  sensitive responsiveness - key in establishing early attachments, the ability to anticipate its needs and communicate with it in a sensitive way.
• asocial stage: 0-2 months, newborn responds equally to any caregiver, cannot differentiate between animate and inanimate. begin to show preference for social stimuli such as reciprocity and interactional synchrony.
• indiscriminate stage: 3-7 months, infants show a preference for certain people but do not yet show stranger anxiety. they are generally sociable and can distinguish between animate and inanimate objects.
• specific stage: by 7 months, infants begin to show a special preference for one attachment figure. they experience stranger anxiety and separation anxiety, evidence that they have formed an attachment. the primary attachment is based on quality of care rather than quantity (sensitive responsiveness).
• multiple stage: after 8 months, infant becomes more independent, can form multiple attachments - usually father as a secondary attachment figure, but attachment is not as intense.
• limitation of Schaffer and Emerson’s study

  -unreliable data.

  -the study was based on mother’s reports of their own infants.

  -some mothers may be more or less sensitive to their own infants, so they could have been over reported or under reported.

  -this creates a systematic bias which would challenge the data’s validity.
• limitation of Schaffer and Emerson’s study

  -the sample was biased

  -from a working class population, findings may not apply to other social groups - conducted in 1960’s, lacking historical validity, and the number of fathers as primary caregivers has quadrupled over 25 years.

  -therefore the study lacks temporal validity. If the study was repeated today the results would be very different.