A- Cultural Variations Flashcards
Who conducted a meta-analysis of 32 studies into attachment?
Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg (1988) conducted a meta-analysis of 32 studies into attachment to see if attachment occurs in the same way across all cultures.
What was the procedure of their experiment?
- All of the studies they included had used the strange situation to measure attachment.
- These studies looked at the relationships between mothers and their babies, all of whom were under 24 months of age.
- The studies were conducted in eight countries, some individualistic cultures (USA, UK, and Germany) and some collectivist cultures (Japan, China, and Israel).
What were the findings of Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg’s experiment?
The main findings were:
- Secure attachment was the most common attachment style in all of the eight countries studied.
- The second most common attachment style was insecure-avoidant, except in Israel and Japan where resistant was common.
- The lowest percentage of secure attachments was in China. (50%)
- The highest percentage of secure attachments was in Great Britain. (75%)
- The highest percentage of insecure-avoidant attachments was in West Germany. (35%)
- Overall variations within cultures were 1.5 times greater than the variation between cultures.
What did the similarities and variations between cultures suggest?
- The similarities between cultures suggest that caregiver and infant interactions have universal characteristics and so may be partly instinctive.
- However, the variations between cultures show that the cultural differences in child rearing practices also play an important role in attachment styles.
- The variations within cultures indicate that sub-cultural differences, such as social class, play an important role in an infant’s attachment style.
- These factors are possibly more important than culture
Evaluate cultural variation in attachment (ADVANTAGES)
1) LARGE SAMPLES
- 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.
- For example, in the Van Ijzendoorn meta-analysis there was a total of 2000 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 or very unusual participants.
2) Use of indigenous researchers (researchers from the same background as the ppt) . van ijzendoorn and kroonenberg used German team (Grossman et al) and Japanenese researcher Takahashi.
- avoids the potential problems faced in cross cultural research such as misunderstanding language or difficulty communicating with other cultures
- reduces bias because of stereotypes of one’s nation - increasing overall validity of research.
Evaluate cultural variation in attachment. (DISADVANTAGES)
1) SAMPLES TEND TO BE UNREPRESENTATIVE OF CULTURE
- The meta-analysis by Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg claimed to study cultural variation whereas in fact the comparisons were between countries and not cultures.
- Within any country there are many different cultures each with different child-rearing practices.
- One sample could over-represent poor people or even rich people.
- For example, in Japan, children reared in an urban setting were more likely to show the same attachment patterns as was found in the Western studies whereas a more rural sample in Japan had an over-representation of insecure-resistant children.
- This means that comparisons between countries may not be as relevant as comparisons between different cultures in one country!
2) All of the studies used in this meta-analysis looked at infants’ attachments to their mothers.
- Children might be insecurely attached to their mothers but securely attached to their fathers.
- The strange situation is therefore not measuring a child’s attachment style but their attachment to one individual.
- Main and Weston (1981) found that children behave differently depending on which parent they are with.
3) IMPOSED ETIC in strange situation , we impose an idea that works in one culture to other cultures where it may be inappropriate to do so, for example lack of reunion joy and affection in USA and Uk would class the child as avoidant and would be seen as negative however in Germany this would be seen as a sign of independence rather than insecurity. This means the methodology is culturally biased and may be meaningless to use to explain attachment types in all cultures.
4) EXISTENCE OF A FOURTH TYPE OF ATTACHMENT STYLE :
A weakness of strange situation is that later research demonstrated that Ainsworth has not accounted for a key fourth type of attachment. Main and Solomon analysed over 200 Strange Situation tapes and proposed a type D attachment: insecure-disorganised. This was characterised by a lack of consistent social behaviour and attachment. These infants lacked a coherent strategy of dealing with stress of separation – they showed very strong attachment, which was suddenly followed by avoidance or looking scared of the caregiver
Since Ainsworth’s research did not account for this attachment her research on attachments could be seen as lacking sufficient detail
This reduces the validity of the findings
what did takashi find ?
Japan has the highest percentage of insecure resistant
