Cultural variations in attachment Flashcards
What is culture?
Culture refers to the norms and values that exist within a group of people.
What are cultural variations?
Cultural variations refer to the differences in those norms and values that exist between different groups.
How does attachment differ in culture?
Individualistic - these are the western cultures such as UK, USA and Europe. An individualistic culture values independence and the importance of the individual.
Collectivist - these are often classed as non-western cultures and include places such as Japan, India and Israel. A collectivist culture emphasises the importance of the group/collective and often involve a greater amount of ‘sharing’ such as large groups/families living and working together, sharing tasks, belongings and childrearing.
What did Van ljzendoorn et al (1988) do and find?
Meta analysis of 32 studies of attachment that used the “Strange Situation”.
Conducted in 8 countries: UK, Sweden, Japan, Netherlands, USA, Israel, Germany & China.
Looked at the three attachment types and their frequency in each country.
Inter-country differences (differences between countries & types of attachment).
Intra-country differences (differences within the same country and types of attachment).
Which was the most common attachment type in each country? - secure attachment.
Which was the least common attachment type overall? – insecure-resistant attachment.
Where was the insecure avoidant attachment type most and least common? – most – Germany and least – Japan.
What did Takahashi (1990) do and find?
Conducted a study in Japan using the Strange Situation on 60 middle class infants.
Showed similar rates of secure attachment to Ainsworth but no infants were insecure avoidant and consequently high rates of insecure resistant attachment. The Japanese infants were particularly distressed on being left alone.
What did Simonella et al (2014) do, find and conclude?
Conducted a study in Italy- 76 children aged 12 months by using the Strange Situation to look at attachment types.
50% of children had a secure attachment.
36% of children has an insecure-avoidant attachment.
They concluded that the reason for a lower rate of secure attachment was due to childcare- more children were being put into childcare at an earlier age due to parent’s career.
What are the strengths of cultural variations of attachment?
One strength of cultural variations of attachment research is the sample size used in Van Ijzendoorn’s research. How many children were used in the meta analysis? How could we describe the sample? Representative. This is a strength because…. What does this mean we can do with our findings? What are the findings high in? What does it suggest about attachment worldwide e.g. most popular attachment style?
Another strength of cultural variations is that the one of the studies e.g. Van Ijzendoorn is a meta analysis. What is a meta analysis? - How would we describe the results from a meta analysis and why is this the case? More reliable as the findings from a number of studies are used. This is a strength because we can therefore conclude that the results from many studies show that we do form attachments regardless of culture and for the majority of people (2/3) we form secure attachments. We could therefore conclude that regardless of culture and cultural differences we aim to form secure attachments.
What are the limitations of cultural variations of attachment?
One limitation is the method/test that was used in cultural variation research; the Strange Situation is culturally biased. The “Strange Situation” was constructed on Individualistic ideas e.g. what the US would define as stranger/ separation anxiety. Little thought was given to how this might appear in children from other cultures. This is a limitation because it fails to take into account views from other cultures and simply assesses attachment style using the view point of Individualistic cultures. We could argue that cultural variation research imposes their views on attachment on to other cultures when it shouldn’t.
Despite cultural variation research being representative in terms of sample size we could still criticise the research as being unrepresentative. In Van Izjendoorn’s study, which continents were excluded from their sample? What does that mean we cant do with our results? This is a limitation because we don’t know whether attachment styles differ in these countries or whether they show a similar pattern as the rest of the world e.g. secure attachments are most common.
