Ainsworth Strange Situation A03

Question 1

Strenght - support for validity

Answer 1

• Attachment type as defined by the Strange Situation is strongly predictive of later development.
• Babies assessed as secure typically go on to have better outcomes in many areas, ranging from success at school to romantic relationships and friendships in adulthood.
• Insecure-resistant attachment is associated with the worst outcomes including bullying in later childhood (Kokkinos 2007) and adult mental health problems (Ward et al. 2006).
• This is evidence for the validity of the concept because it can explain subsequent outcomes.

Question 2

Strenght - good reliability

Answer 2

• The Strange Situation shows very good inter-rater reliability.
• In other words different observers watching the same children in the Strange Situation generally agree on what attachment type to classify them with.
• This may be because the Strange Situation takes place under controlled conditions and because the behavioural categories are easy to observe
• Bick et al. (2012) looked at inter-rater reliability in a team of trained Strange Situation observers and found agreement on attachment type for 94% of tested babies.
• This means we can be confident that the attachment type of an infant identified in the Strange Situation does not just depend on who is observing them.

Question 3

Limitation - test may be culture - bound

Answer 3

• i.e. it does not have the same meaning in countries outside Western Europe and USA.
• This is for two reasons.
• First, cultural differences in childhood experiences are likely to mean that children respond differently to the Strange Situation. Second, caregivers from different cultures behave differently in the Strange Situation.
• For example Takahashi (1990) has noted that the test does not really work in Japan because Japanese mothers are so rarely separated from their babies that, as we would expect, there are very high levels of separation anxiety.
• Also in the reunion stage Japanese mothers rushed to the baby and scooped them up, meaning the child’s response was hard to observe.