Cultural Variations For Attachment

Question 1

What is culture?

Answer 1

The term culture refers to all the rules, customs, morals and ways of interacting that bind together members of a society or some other collection of people. We learn all of these through socialisation
There are two key types of cultures individualist and collectivist.
Collectivist cultures are usually non western countries and emphasise the importance of the group or collective and are characterised by how things are shared such as tasks, belongings responsibility etc. They value interdependence and examples are Japan or Israel

Individualist cultures are usually western cultures and and value independence and the importance of the individual.

Question 2

Key studies

Answer 2

Ainsworth Uganda-they looked at 26 mothers and infants in six villages around Kampala, they observed mothers who where more sensitive to their children’s needs tended to have securely attached children, leading to more competent and independent children

Simonella Italy- with a sample of 76 one year olds using the strange situation only 50% where found to be securely attached with 36% being insecure avoidant, this lower rate of secure attachment may be due to more children being put in professional childcare as more women work suggesting cultural changes affect infant attachment

Takahashi Japan- in 1990 they looked at 60 middle class Japanese women and their children using the strange situation, they found that there where low rates of insecure avoidant but higher rates of insecure resistant at 32% and in general the infants response to being separated was so extreme that 90% of the time the study had to be stopped. This shows how cultural variation affect infant attachment as in Japan infants are hardly separated from their mother.

Tronick zaire- they studied an African tribe which had the infants looked after and breastfed by many different women but the infants still showed signs of having one primary attachment at 6 months of age, this supports monotropy

Question 3

Kroonenberg study

Answer 3

A meta analysis of 32 studies of attachment looked at over 2000 strange situations from 8 countries. These countries where:
China, Netherlands, USA, UK, Japan, Israel, Sweden and west Germany.

In all countries secure attachment was most common, China had the lowest amount of secure attachment. This suggests most children regardless of other factors will become securely attached.
Insecure avoidant was the next most common except in collectivist cultures such as Japan or Israel
Insecure resistant was more common in these countries
Variations of studies between countries was 150% greater then those between countries suggesting cultural practices and other factors played a large role

Question 4

Evaluation

Answer 4

+) there are large samples such as the 2000 babies for the Van Lkzendoorn meta study, this increases internal validity

• ) samples tend to be unrepresentative of culture as they looked at countries more then culture and many of the subcultures were not represented such as the Japanese study showed mostly urban babies who would be raised in a more similar way to western culture.
• ) the method kf assessment is baised as the strange situations uses western based theories and assessments and these are applied to other cultures, an example is lack of pleasure on reunion shows insecure attachment when in some cultures it shows independence. Another example secure attachment leads to emotionally competent adults but emotional competence changes across cultures as the amount you can share your emotions vary. And the secure base is supposed to promote independence but in Japan encourages dependence.