Ainsworth's strange situation

• The aim of Ainsworth's strange situation study was to observe key attachment behaviours to asses the quality of a child's attachment to a caregiver
• Ainsworth used a sample size of 26 infants aged between 9-18 months old from middle class families living in Baltimore USA.
• The procedure of Ainsworth's study had 7 episodes, which tested different attachment behaviours:

  1. The child is encouraged to explore as their parent sits, testing exploration and secure base
  2. A stranger then enters the room and tries to interact with the child, stranger anxiety
  3. The parent leaves and stranger offers comfort, separation & stranger anxiety
  4. caregiver returns, stranger leaves - reunion behaviour
  5. Caregiver leaves child alone - separation anxiety
  6. Stranger returns - stranger anxiety
  7. Caregiver returns and is reunited with child - reunion behaviour
• Ainsworth found there were 3 main types of attachment:

  1. Secure attachment (66% of infants)
  2. Insecure avoidant (22% of infants)
  3. Insecure resistant (12% of infants)
• Securely attached infants explore happily, but regularly go back to their caregivers (proximity seeking and secure base behaviour). They show moderate separation and stranger anxiety and will accept comfort from their caregivers in the reunion stage. About 66% of infants are securely attached.
• Insecurely avoidantly attached infants do not seem bothered by being left or when strangers enter the room. They may ignore their caregivers during the reunion stage and prefer to play on their own rather than seek proximity. This type of attachment is associated with poorer social skills later in life. Around 20% of infants have this type of attachment.
• Insecure-resistant attachment children seek high amounts of proximity and explore less. They show huge stranger and separation distress but then resist comfort and feel conflicted when comforted, this is around 12% of infants
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  A fourth type of attachment

  Main and Solomon analysed 200 strange situation studies and proposed a 4th attachment type:

  Insecure-disorganised

  • This attachment type is characterised by a lack of consistent patterns of behaviour, with no consistent attachment type, they do not have a coherent strategy to deal with anxiety e.g during separation.
  • Ijzendoorn suggested 15% of children may be insecurely disorganised

  This suggests Ainsworth's conclusions were oversimplified
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  Observations had high reliability

  Using inter-observer reliability, where researchers agree on operationalised behavioural categories and then observer the study independently and compare their data together. They then look for a statistical score of 0.8+ on the similarities of the observers results for the experiment to be considered reliable

  • Ainsworth found a 0.94 agreement between the roles
  • Results from the strange situation are very reliable
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  Real world application


  The strange situation can be used to develop intervention strategies to to fix disordered attachments between infants and caregivers.

  Caregivers are able to better understand their infants distress signals & understand when they feel anxious

  • This intervention from the Circle Of Security project decreased the number of disordered attachments from 60% to 15%
  • And also increased secure attachments by 8%

  The strange situation is important in improving the livelihood of many infants and caregivers
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  Low internal validity

  Did the study measure attachment types or the quality of one attachment?

  Mains and Weston found children behaved differently in the strange situation depending on what parent they were with, suggesting the study may not be valid to classify attachment types as we are studying one relationship rather than personal characteristics

  This challenges whether the strange situation actually measured attachment types as it set out to or just the quality of one particular relationship
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  Maternal reflective functioning


  Ainsworth's suggestion that secure attachments were linked to maternal sensitivity has been criticised

  Raval et Al (2001) found a low correlation between measures of maternal sensitivity and the strength of attachment.

  Slade et Al found a greater role for maternal reflective functioning, this is the ability to understand what the infant is thinking and feeling. Suggesting maternal reflective functioning, not sensitivity is the central cause of establishing attachment types