Cultural variations in attachment

• Cultural Variations

  • This is the differences in child-rearing practices and attachment types between different cultural groups.
• • Cross-cultural studies are the comparison of findings from people of different cultures.
• Imposed etic

  • Using different techniques that are only relevant to one culture to study and/or draw conclusions about another.
• Cross-cultural patterns of attachment :

  • Van Ijzendoorn & Kroonenberg (1988) investigated if attachment styles (secure and insecure) are universal across cultures or culturally specific.
  • They did not collect the data for their study. Instead, they analysed data from other studies using a method called a meta-analysis. Data from 32 studies in 8 different countries were analysed.
• Van Ijzendoorn & Kroonenberg (1988) Study Findings:

  • Van Ijzendoorn & Kroonenberg found that secure attachment was the majority of infants (70%). The lowest percentage of secure attachments was shown in China and the highest in Great Britain.
  • It was also found that Western countries that support independence, such as Germany, had high levels of insecure-avoidant.
  • Whereas Eastern countries that are more culturally close, such as Japan, had quite high levels of insecure resistant. The exception to the pattern was China which had an equal number of avoidant and resistant infants.
• Evaluation of Van Ijzendoorn & Kroonenberg (1988) cultural study:

  • One problem is that many of the studies used in the meta-analysis had biased samples, which cannot claim to be representative of each culture. For example, only 36 infants were used in the Chinese study, which is a very small sample size for such a populated country. Also, most of the studies analyzed were from Western cultures.
• Evaluation of Van Ijzendoorn & Kroonenberg (1988) cultural study:

  • The Strange Situation was created and tested in the USA, which means that it may be ethnocentric as it will reflect the norms and values of American culture.
  • There is a significant variation of attachments within cultures: Van Ijzendoorn looked at multiple studies in each country and found that every study produced different levels of each attachment classification. This intra-cultural variation suggests that it is an oversimplification to assume all children are brought up in the same way in a particular country.