Schaffer’s Stages

• Schaffer and Emerson study

  • Studied 60 Glasgow infants (31 male, 29 female) from working-class homes
  • Infants were aged 5-23 weeks
  • Infants were visited monthly until 18 months old
  • Interactions with their carers were observed in their own home
  • Mothers kept a diary of infant's response to separation in seven everyday situations
• Attachment

  Formed with carers who were sensitive to baby's signals
• By 10 months most infants had several attachments
• At 18 months roughly half had the mother as the main attachment figure and the father for most of the others
• Schaffer’s research led to the formulation of four stages of developmental progress: Asocial (first few weeks) behaviour towards humans and inanimate objects is fairly similar, Indiscriminate attachments (2-7 months) preference for being with other humans but dont tend to have separation anxiety, Specific discriminate attachments (7-8 months) attachment towards one particular person and shows stranger anxiety, Multiple attachment (9 months +) extend attachments to people they often see.
• His study shows good external validity, good inter-rater reliability, real world application and it was done on a large scale. However the mothers could’ve been bias, and it was only studied on 1960s working class Glasgow babies. There is also poor evidence for the asocial stage as babies are immobile so if they had anxiety it would be hard to observe.