Cultural Variations Flashcards
What is an individualistic culture?
A culture that emphasises individuality, individual needs, and independence. People tend to live in small nuclear families.
What is a collectivist culture?
A culture where the individuals share tasks, belongings and income. The people may live in large family groups.
What was the aim of Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg’s 1988 research?
To investigate the cross-cultural variation in attachment types, through a meta-analysis.
Only used findings from studies that had used the strange situation, in order to draw inferences about the external validity of this as a measure.
What was the procedure of Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg’s 1988 research?
Meta-analysis of 32 studies that had used the Strange Situation to measure and classify the relationship between mother and infant.
Research from eight different nations were compared, including western (USA, GB, Sweden, Netherlands) and non-western (China, Japan, Israel) cultures.
There was a total of 1,979 mother and infant pairs.
What was found about all nations, in Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg’s 1988 research?
Secure attachment as the most common across all nations.
What was found about western cultures, in Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg’s 1988 research?
Western cultures’ dominant insecure attachment type was avoidant.
What was found about non-western cultures, in Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg’s 1988 research?
Non-western cultures’ dominant insecure attachment type was resistant.
What was the exception that Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg’s 1988 research found?
China was the exception with an equal number of avoidant and resistant types (25% for both).
What was the key finding found about attachments, from Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg’s 1988 research?
A key finding was that there was one and a half times greater variations within cultures than between them.
Intra-cultural variation greater than inter-cultural variation.
E.g. In 1 USA sample 94% were avoidant, while in another, 47% were avoidant.
Outline two conclusions from Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg’s 1988 research?
Consistency in attachment styles leads to the conclusion there maybe universal characteristics that underpin infant and caregiver interactions.
Significant variations shows that there are greater variations in attachment types among different groups in society.
Differing child-rearing practices have been implicated in the observed variations in attachment.
The greater variation found within cultures suggests that a sub-cultural comparison (defined as a social class or ethnicity) would have been more valid.
What were two positives from Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg’s 1988 research?
There was a very large sample of different countries.
As all the studies were on the Strange Situation, they were all performed the same way. This means that there was a high level of control, thus a high level of internal validity - making the meta-analysis more reliable. (All had operationalised attachment the same).
What were three negatives from Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg’s 1988 research?
Lack of consistency across cultures. E.g. 25 mother pairs represented China, but 1,230 pairs were used for USA. Underrepresented.
Was originally done by an American, on American infants - so western culture is being forced.
Different cultures perceive attachment types differently. This is an imposed etic.
Main and Solomon, (1986), found a fourth attachment type - disorganised. This disorganised attachment type was not considered in the study; perhaps some infants were miscategorised.
Many infants that came out of the study with an attachment type that was frowned upon by their culture were sometimes separated from their parents.
Intra-cultural cultures were not represented. For example, Amish communities would not have participated as they do not used electricity - hence not being able to be considered through mainly online applications and documentations.
Doesn’t explain why patterns of attachment vary so much within cultures.
Outline Takahashi’s research from 1990.
(Challenges Ainsworth’s Strange Situation)
Challenges Ainsworth’s Strange Situation.
This is because they found that of middle class Japanese infants: 68% were secure, 0% were avoidant, and 32% resistant.
This suggests that there are different cultural differences in the way infants respond to separation.
Who proposed the idea of amae?
(Japanese cultures)
Takeo Doi.
What is amae?
(Japanese cultures)
Emotional dependence.
Children showing amae exhibit much clinging behaviour and the need for attention.
A child showing these behaviours in western culture would be labelled as insecure resistant.
