schaffer stages of attachment

• Shaffer and Emerson aimed to investigate the formation of early attachments, they used 60 babies from Glasgow working class families. They visited their homes every month for a year, then again at 18months and asked mothers questions about the babies stranger/separation anxiety.
• Based on their findings they proposed attachments develop in 4 stages. such as asocial, indiscriminate attachment, specific attachment, multiple attachments
• Asocial stage, this is the stage that baby is finding objects and humans are similar. 
• Indiscriminate attachment, from 2-7 months where babies display more observable social behaviour. Preference for people over objects and prefer familiar adults, however do not show stranger or separation anxiety.
• Specific attachment, from around 7 months majority of babies display stranger anxiety and separation anxiety from one particular adult (usually mother in 65% of cases). Specific attachment with primary attachment figure, but this is not necessarily the person the child spent the most time with but who offers the most interaction and responds to baby's 'signals'. 
• Multiple attachments, shortly after the babies start to show attachment to one adult usually extend to multiple attachments with other adults who regularly spend time with. In Schaffer & Emersons study 29% of children had secondary attachment within a month of primary attachment.
• A weakness of these stages of attachment are that they are culturally relative. found that infants raised in individualist cultures (first by the family) were twice as close to their mothers in comparison to those raised in collectivist cultures (by the community). These results suggest that attachments are culturally specific and the fact that Schaffer & Emersons study was only carried out in Individualist cultures not allowing us to apply the stages of attachment formation to collectivist cultures.
• weakness for this are there are problems with the Asocial stage. This is because it is during the first few weeks of life the problem is that babies that are young have poor co-ordination and are immobile. Therefore it is very difficult to make any judgements about them based on first observations of behaviour. Although it is likely the Childs feelings and emotions are highly social, evidence cannot be relied on.
• Strengths of Indiscriminate Attachment is that it can explain why some babies become attached to anyone whereas others don’t. It suggests that if a baby does not receive enough attention then they will not develop a strong attachment to anyone. This could be due to neglectful parents or being placed into foster homes. The theory explains how babies can become attached to anyone regardless of whether they are male or female, which supports the idea that attachment is formed through interactions rather than gender.