Cultural variations in attachment

• Culture refers to the distinct characteristics of a particular group of people within society which can include shared beliefs and values that over time become traditions
• Individualistic cultures emphasise on personal achievement, developing initiative in infants and mothers react favourably to independence
• Collective cultures emphasise on group effort and cooperation, focus on interpersonal development of infants and are more favourable reaction to obedience and social behaviour
• Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg (1988) carried out a meta analysis to find out about attachment types in different cultures
• The aim of the study was to investigate cross culture variation in attachment types
• A meta analysis was conducted that compared the findings of 32 studies that used the strange situation. Research from 8 nations was compared including indivdualistic cultures and collectivistic cultures. The researchers were interested in both inter-cultural and intra-cultural differences
• The secure attachment type was the most common attachment type in all 8 nations studied
• In individualistic cultures the dominant insecure type was avoidant. In collectivistic cultures the dominant insecure type was resistant. China was an exception as avoidant and resistant types were equally distributed
• A key finding Was that there was one and a half time greater variation within cultures than between cultures
• There are great variations in attachment types among different groups in society and the implication is that these variations are a product of different child rearing practices
• Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg examined around 2000 infants and caregivers in their research study which reduces the impact of anomalous results on conclusions and increase internal validity
• Some of the studies included a small number of infants, for example the Chinese study only included 36 infants in their sample. this affects the generalisability of the findings since they might not represent attachment in the whole population
• It could be argued that, since the strange situation was designed in individualistic cultures, it’s inappropriate for studying behaviours in other cultures. This is known as an imposed etic, which occurs when the norms and values of one culture are used to interpret behaviours that occur in another
• Some children who might appear to be insecurely attached by western standards aren’t insecure within their own culture. This means that research using the strange situation may lack validity when inappropriately generalised to non-western cultures