Cultural variation

• What was Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg's procedure?

  • they did a meta analysis of 32 studies on the strange situation and combined all the results together
• what did van ijezdoorn and kroonenberg find about secure attachment


  • in all countries, secure attachment was the most common.
  • 75% in Britain and 50% in China.
• what did van ijezdoorn and kroonenberg find about insecure resistant attachment


  • in individualist cultures, insecure resistant attachment were similar to Ainsworth
  • BUT in collectivist cultures like China and Japan, the rate was over 24%
• what did Grossman find about German babies

  • that they are very independent
  • therefore likely to be insecure avoidant according to the Strange situation
• large sample sizes


  • in Van Izjendoorn and Krunburgs meta analysis there was over 2000 babies in the study.
  • this increases internal validity
  • shows that we are able to generalise these findings as the sample size is so large
• strange situation lack validity


  • because it was done in a lab it cannot be easily applied to everyday world.
  • the strange situation basically measures anxiety not attachment types