Don’t need - Cultural Variations In Attachment Flashcards
Who did a study on cultural variations and when?
Van Ijezendoorn and Kroonenberg
1988
What are cultural variations?
The ways that different groups of people vary in terms of their social practices, and the effects these practices have on development and behaviour.
What was the procedure of the cultural variations study?
They conducted a meta-analysis of the findings from 32 studies of attachment behaviour.
Altogether the studies examined over 2,000 strange situation classifications in 8 different countries.
What were Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonberg interested to find out?
Whether there would be evidence that inter-cultural differences did exist (differences between cultures/countries).
Whether there were intra-cultural differences (differences from studies in the same country/culture).
What did Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg find?
Found that differences were small
Secure attachment was most the common classification in every country.
Insecure-avoidant was the next most common apart from in Israel and japan.
They found that variation within cultures was 1.5 greater than variation between cultures.
What does secure attachment show as it is the most common?
Supports the idea that secure attachment is best for healthy social and emotional development.
These cultural similarities support the view that attachment is an innate and biological process.
What are the cultural similarities with this study?
Other studies support it.
E.g - Tronick (1992) studied an African tribe, the Efe, from Zaire who lived in extended family groups.
The infants were looked after and even breastfed by different women but usually they slept with their own mother at night.
Despite such differences in child rearing practices the infants, at six months, still showed one primary attachment.
What are the cultural differences with this study?
Grossman and Grossman (1991)
Takahashi (1990)
What did Grossmann and Grossmann find?
They found that German infants tended to be classified as insecurely rather than securely attached. This may be due to different childrearing practices.
German culture often involves keeping some interpersonal distance between parents and children, so infants do not engage in proximity-seeking behaviours i the strange situation and thus appears to be insecurely attached.
What did Takahashi do?
Used the strange situation to study 60 middle-class Japanese infants and their mothers, and found similar rates of secure attachment to those found by Ainsworth.
However, the Japanese infants showed no evidence of insecure-avoidant and high rates of insecure-resistant.
The Japanese infants were particularly distressed being left alone - in fact their response was so extreme that for 90% of the infants the study was stopped at this point.
In Japan infants rarely experience separation from their mothers, which would explain why they were more distressed in the strange situation than their American counterparts.
This would make them appear to be insecurely attached.
What do the studies on cultural variation suggest?
They suggest that despite the fact that there are cultural variations in infant care arrangements, the strongest attachments are still formed with the infants mother.
The research also shows however, that there are differences in the patterns of attachment that can be related to differences in cultural attitudes and practices.
What are the evaluative points?
Similarities may not be innately determined Nation rather than culture Cross-cultural research Culture bias Indigenous theories of attachment
What is meant by similarities may not be innately determined?
According to Bowlby’s theory the reason for universal similarities in how attachments form is because attachment is an innate mechanism, unmodified by culture.
Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg suggest that at least some cultural similarities might be explained by the effects of mass media (tv, books…), which spread ideas about parenting so, as a result, children all over the world are exposed to similar influences.
This means that cultural similarities may not be due to innate biological influences but are because of our increasingly global culture.
What is meant by nation rather than culture?
The meta-analysis drew conclusions about cultural differences yet they actually were not comparing cultures but countries.
For example, they compared Japan with the US.
Within each there are many different subcultures, each of which may have different childcare practices.
One study of attachment in Tokyo found similar distributions of attachment types to the western studies, whereas a more rural sample found an over-representation of insecure-resistant individuals.
Indeed, they found more variation within cultures than between cultures, presumably because the data was collected on different subcultures within each country.
What is meant by cross-cultural research?
A particular issue for research conducted in different countries is the ‘tools’ that are used.
Psychologists measure behaviour using things like intelligence tests or observational methods such as the strange situation.
Such tools are related to the cultural assumptions of the test/technique designer (e.g - Ainsworth is American).
In the strange situation it is assumed that willingness to explore is a sign of secure attachment. However, as seen, for some cultures this is not the case.
An imposed etic has been used to measure attachment.
This means that research using the strange situation may lack validity.
