Cultural Variations in Attachment, including Van ljzendoorn

• Ethnocentric


  Only using a US sample
• Strange Situation replicated across other countries


  Data examined to see how much of Ainsworth's work could be applied to other countries and cultures
• Van Ijzendoorn


  Dutch psychologist who conducted the largest and most famous study
• Meta-analysis


  Combining data/findings from several other researchers to come to conclusions
• Advantages of meta-analysis


  • Avoided time and costs associated with travel as well as cultural and language barriers
• Countries included in the meta-analysis


  • Great Britain
  • Germany
  • Netherlands
  • Sweden
  • Japan
  • Israel
  • United States
  • China
• Secure attachment (B) is the most commonly found attachment type in all countries studied
• Insecure Avoidant (A) is the second most common attachment type in Western/industrialised/individualistic societies
• Insecure Resistant (C) is the second most common attachment type in non-Western/non-industrialised/collectivist societies
• There is more difference within a culture than between cultures
• If the sound were turned down on the strange situation tapes and there were no clues as to the culture/country they were filmed in


  You would not be able to tell what the country was just by looking at the videos of the infants
• If you watched a day of strange situation films from say, Sweden

  You would see all three attachment types and so there would be variety
• There is more diversity inside the cultures than between them
• Strengths of the meta-analysis

  • Quicker and cheaper than alternatives
  • Allowed researchers to obtain data from countries where language and cultural barriers may have been an issue
  • The study is reliable as it can easily be replicated
  • The large sample from a variety of places makes it representative and generalisable
• Limitations of the meta-analysis


  • Hard to check the validity of some of the studies as the researchers have no way of knowing if the data was collected in a scientific manner
  • A lot of countries and continents are missing including Africa and much of Asia
  • Imbalance of studies used, with so many for the US that those results are also the mean for the whole study
  • The Chinese study only had 25 infants, so a tiny sample representing around 20% of the global population
  • Takahashi found that Japanese infants were often seen as Type C as they were rarely left by their PCG and so the strange situation was terrifying for them, raising the question of whether the strange situation is valid elsewhere