Ainsworth’s Work On Attachment

Question 1

Aim

Answer 1

To investigate how a child behaves towards strangers and their career givers under controlled conditions of stress and use this as an indicator of attachment.

Question 2

Sample

Answer 2

100 middle class American mothers and their children

Question 3

Describe the episodes

Answer 3

3 minutes per each episode, 8 episodes, stopped only when child became distressed from separation from mother

Question 4

Types of attachment

Answer 4

A = insecure avoidant
- high exploration, comfortable separation, hostile on reunion
B = secure
- high exploration, high separation anxiety, excited upon reunion
C = insecure resistant
- low exploration, highly distressed on separation, clingy on reunion despite first hostile

Question 5

Generalisable

Answer 5

Population validity
- Representative 100 middle-class American mothers and their children

Question 6

Reliabilty

Answer 6

Standardised procedures = easy replication
- 3min x 8 series
- controlled environment in 9x9 foot box marked into 16 squares to help in recording of babies movements

Question 7

Inter-rater reliabilty

Answer 7

panel of experienced professional observers
- almost perfect agreement when rating exploratory behaviour on a score of 1-7 so observations can be trusted

Question 8

Bowlby (1994) 44 Juvenile Thieves

Answer 8

Maternal deprivation leads to adolescence delinquency and a vulnerability to mental health issues in later life.
- 44 children attending guidance clinic compared to controls found 14 thieves ‘affection less psychopathy’

Question 9

Application to childcare: Cooper et al. (2005)

Answer 9

Intervention strategies to teach caregivers about signals of distress and anxiety in a baby.
- increase in securely attached babies shoes research can be used to improve children’s lives

Question 10

Ungeneralisable - estrocentric and culture bias

Answer 10

Estrocentric
- imposed etic means can only be generalised of American child rearing strategies and mother child relationships
Culture bias
- different cultures have different child rearing practices

Question 11

Lacks ecological validity

Answer 11

Unnatural laboratory setting lacks mundane realism = unnnatural child behaviour and mothers behaviour may be socially desirable behaviour is unrealistic.

Question 12

Unethical

Answer 12

Causes child distress because the episode only stopped when the child became distressed form separation.
Takahashi - repeated this experiment with Japanese children and mothers and found that 90% of the experiments had to be stopped because the children was too distress upon the separation with mother