Cultural Variations Including Van Ljizendoorn Flashcards
What is meant by cultural variations?
• Cultural variations in attachment are the differences in norms and values about parenting and how parents are expected to behave.
• Studies have therefore been conducted in different countries, to examine whether the theory applies to all people (is universal) or whether the behaviour only applies to one particular culture (is culture bound).
What was the aim of van lijzendoorn and kroonenburg?
to investigate the proportion of secure, insecure-avoidant, and insecure-resistant attachment across a range of countries. They also looked at the difference within the same country to get an idea of the variations within a culture.
What was the procedure?
a meta-analysis of the findings from 32 studies carried out in 8 different countries using the strange situation to measure attachment. Overall, the 32 studies yielded results for 1,900 children. All studies comprised of at least 35 mother and infant pairs with infants below 2 years of age. The research included individualist cultures (e.g., US, Great Britain, Germany) and collectivist cultures (e.g. Japan, China, Israel).
What were the findings?
• Overall attachment was: secure 67%, insecure-avoidant 21% and insecure-resistant 12%.
• Secure attachment was the most common in all cultures; however, the proportion varied from 75% in Britain to 50% in China.
• Insecure-resistant was overall the least common type although it was found more in Israel, Japan (27%) , and China. In comparison to Great Britain which was 3%
• Insecure-avoidant attachments were observed most commonly in Germany (35%)and least commonly in Israel and Japan (5%) (collectivist countries at the time).
• An interesting finding was the variation within the same country was actually 1.5 times greater than those between countries. In the USA, for example, one study found only 46% securely attached compared to one sample as high as 90%.
Conclusion: In conclusion the global pattern of attachment across cultures appears to be similar to that found in the U.S. This supports the idea that secure attachment is ‘best’ for healthy social and emotional development. Secure attachment seems to be the norm in a wide range of cultures, confirming Bowlby’s idea that attachment is innate and universal.
What is the strength with population validity?
A strength of combining the results of attachment studies carried out in different countries is that you can end up with a very large sample. In Van Ijzendoorn meta-analysis there was a total of nearly 2000 babies and their primary attachment figure. However, care should be taken when drawing conclusions from Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg’s because of the limited variety of studies used. Over half (18) of the 32 studies were carried out in the US, whereas only one was carried out in China. 27 studies were carried out in individualistic cultures and only 5 in collectivist cultures. This suggests that the limited number of countries and small samples used may not be truly representative of the population and therefore more research must be conducted in a variety of cultures with larger samples to allow for meaningful comparisons.
What is the imposed etic?
The Strange Situation (which was developed in the U.S.) may not be an appropriate way of measuring attachment types in other cultures as the Strange Situation reflects the norms and values of American culture. The use of a technique developed in one culture to study another is known as an imposed etic and it makes the methodology inherently flawed. For example, children raised on the Israeli Kibbutz are most distressed at the arrival of the stranger (Fox, 1977) and German children are more likely to be classed as insecure avoidant because their parents value independence (Grossmann and Grossmann, 1991). These examples show that the strange situation has a different meaning in different cultures. This suggests that the Strange Situation may not be a valid measure of attachment in different cultures and if we are to interpret the findings of the Strange Situation accurately, we need to know about the child rearing practices of those cultures.
What is the limitation of country not cultures?
meta-analysis by Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg drew conclusion about cultural differences, yet they actually were not comparing cultures but countries. For example, they compared Japan with the US. Within each country there are many difference subcultures, each of which may have different child caring practices. One study of attachment in Tokyo (an urban setting) found similar distributions of attachment types to other Western studies, whereas a more rural sample found an over-representation of insecure-resistant individuals. Indeed, Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg found more variations within cultures than between cultures, presumably because the data was collected on different subcultures within each country. Therefore, greater caution should be exercised in assuming that an individual sample is representative of a particular culture.
What is the issue with temperament hypothesis ?
differences in attachment types were a result of the mother’s sensitivity to the children’s needs. However, Kagan (1982) criticised the strange situation for placing too much emphasis on the role of the mother and ignores the temperament of the child. The temperament hypothesis suggests it is the child’s innate personality, the genetically influenced personality of the child that is the key factor in the formation of attachment (e.g., some infants form secure attachments because they are innately friendlier than other infants). If the strange situation is affected by factors other than attachment, for example, innate personality, then it lacks validity as a measurement tool, and if the bulk of research into cultural variations has used the strange situation and it lacks validity, then all the findings of this research are called into question, and we may therefore actually know very little about cultural variations in attachment.
