cultural variations in attachment Flashcards
what does cultural variations in attachment refer to?
differences in the norms and values that exist between people in different cultural groups
what was the procedure of van ijzendoorn and kroonenberg’s study?
● researchers looked at proportions of secure, insecure avoidant and insecure resistant attachments
● between a range of countries
● also looked at the differences within the same countries to get an idea of variations within a culture
● they found 32 studies of attachment where the strange situation had been used (18 of these were in the USA)
● these were conducted in 8 countries, yielding results for nearly 2000 children
● the data was meta analysed
what were the findings of van ijzendoorn and kroonenberg’s study?
● the most common attachment type is secure (at 65%)
● great britain had the highest percentage for the secure attachment type (at 75%)
● china had the lowest percentage of the secure attachment type (at 50%)
● the least common attachment was insecure resistant (14%)
● the insecure avoidant attachment type was most common in west germany
● israel, japan and china had the highest rates of the insecure resistant attachment type, above 25%
what were the conclusions of van ijzendoorn and kroonenberg’s study?
● study suggests that there were cultural variations in the distribution of attachment types
● however, the variation within cultures was 1.5 times greater than the variation between cultures
● e.g. in 1 area if the USA there were only 46% of children securely attached, whereas in another area of america, 90% were securely attached
explain the additional research conducted by simonelli et al
● conducted study in Italy on 76 children aged 12 months using strange situation to look at attachment types
● 50% of children had a secure attachment
● 36% of children had an insecure avoidant attachment
● 14% of children were insecure resistant
● concluded that the reason for the higher rates of insecure avoidant attachments was due to increased use of childcare
● more children were being put into childcare at an earlier age due to parents career
