Cultural Variations in attachment

• Culture - Norms and values that exist within any group of people
• Meta Analysis - Statistical process that combines data of multiple studies to find common results to identify overall trends
• Emic Research - Studies a single culture to understand culture-specific behaviour (cultural uniqueness)
• Etic Research - Compares psychological phenomena across cultures to discover universal behaviour (imposed etic, cultural universals - trying to apply a theory designed for one culture to another)
• A strength of combining the results of attachment studies carried out in different countries is that you can end up with a very large sample. E.g, Ijzendoorn meta-analysis there was nearly 2,000 babies and their primary attachment figures. This overall sample size is a strength because large samples increase internal validity by reducing the impact of anomalous results caused by bad methodology/unusual participants
• A weakness is samples tend to be unrepresentative of culture. The meta-analysis of Ijzerman et al. claimed to study cultural variation whereas in fact, the comparisons were between countries and not cultures. There are many cultures within a country with different child-rearing practices. Ijzerman found distributions of attachment type in Tokyo were similar to Western studies whereas a more rural sample had an over-representation of insecure-resistant individuals.

  This means comparisons between countries may have little meaning; particular cultural characteristics must be specified.
• Another weakness is the method of assessment is biased. Cross-cultural psychology includes the ideas of etic and emic. The Strange Situation was designed by an American researcher based on British theory. There's a question whether Anglo-American theories and attachments can be applied to other cultures (imposed etic). E.g, lack of separation anxiety and lack of pleasure on reunion indicate insecure attachment in the Strange Situation. In Germany this behaviour might be seen more as independence, not a sign of insecurity within that cultural context.