Cultural variations

Cards (26)

  • Cultural bias is where psychologists assume that attachment behaviour was applicable to all cultures, it can also be an imposed etic, where the findings of a study have been generalised to many countries.
    But psychologists are now interested in studying attachment indifferent cultures to determine whether this is applicable to all cultures ( universal ). But are still interested in attachments specific to a culture.
  • Individualistic - emphasis on the importance of independence and individual success, often applies to Western cultures e.g. USA, Britain
  • Collectivist - emphasis on the important of the group/family unit, individual success is much less important, it is more important that the group is successful e.g. Japan, Israel
    But psychologists tend to reject this idea.
  • Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg ( 1988 )
    • A: to look at similarities and differences in attachment between cultures, using research that applied to the ‘strange situation’ to other cultures, meta-analysis study.
    • Studies over 2,000 strange situation classifications in eight different countries
    • 32 studies of attachment behaviour
    • Good about using meta-analysis? - various studies from 8 different countries, saves time, provides results which are generalisable to those countries, cost-efficient, secondary data, can look for cultural differences.
    • Bad about using meta-analysis? - can be outdated, psycholgisits had no idea how experiment was run and operationalised. children can have different definitions of secure attachment depending on the individual differences of the child.
  • Secure attachment was most common across all cultures
    • Individualist ( West Germany ) cultures had higher levels of insecure avoidant children with low levels of insecure resistant
    • Collectivist ( Israel and Japan) cultures had higher evils of insecure resistant children with low levels of insecure-avoidant.
    • Why can it be considered an imposed etic? - findings have been generalised, there may be more than 3 different attachment types.
  • Variation within cultures was 1.5 times greater than the variation between cultures
  • In general, secure attachment was the most common across all cultures, but there ate cultural variations in levels of insecure-resistant and insecure-avoidant attachments.
  • Takahashi ( 1990 ) - used strange situation technique to study 60-middle-class Japanese infants and their          mothers and found similar rates of secure attachment to those found by Ainsworth in the US. However, unlike the original sample, the Japanese infants showed no evidence of insecure-avoidant attachment and high rates of insecure-resistant attachment ( 32% ), the Japanese infants were particularly distressed on being left alone, in fact their response was extreme that 90% of the infants were stopped.
  • Child rearing practices in Japan show infants rarely experience separation from their mother, which would explain why they were more distressed in the strange situation and make them appear more insecurely attached.
  • Fox - Studied infants on Israeli Kibbutzim who spent most of their time being cared for in a communal children’s home by nurses. Attachment was tested in the strange situation with either the nurse oor the mother, the infants appeared equally attached to both caregiver’s except in terms of reunion behaviour, where they showed greater attachment to their mothers. This suggests that mothers were still the primary attachment figure despite the shared care.
  • Grossman - Infants = more likely to be insecurely attached possibly due to child rearing differences, German culture involves keeping some interpersonal distance between parents and children, so infants do not engage in proximity-seeking behaviours in the strange situation and thus appear to be insecurely attached.
  • Evaluation:
    • Despite the large number of studies combined in this meta-analysis, over half were still in the US, only five of the 32 were carried out in collectivist cultures.
  • Evaluation:
    • Strange situation method may be biased towards USA/British culture, he strange situation is designed by an American ( Ainsworth ) based on a British theory ( Bowlby ), this theory and assessment may not be applicable to other cultures, trying to apply a theory or technique designed for one culture to another is known as imposed etic, the idea that a lack of pleasure on reunion indicates secure attachment is an imposed etic, in Germany, this behaviour might be seen as independence than avoidance and not a sign of insecurity.
    • In Japan, there were differences between urban and rural areas, VI found attachment types in urban Tokyo in similar proportions to Western studies, however, a more rural sample over-represented insecure-resistant individuals.
  • Research has suggested that differences in attachment within a culture are far greater than those found between cultures
  • It is wrong to think of everyone in a culture having the same practices
  • Within a culture, there are many sub-cultures, all with their own way of rearing children
  • These sub-cultures may be ethically or racially based but also may be class specific
  • 'Middle class' may have different child-rearing techniques than the 'working class'
  • Sub cultures may be more important than cultural differences
  • The upper classes traditionally have left child rearing to nannies and au pairs