HL - Why relationships change or end

Question 1

Bowlby (1953)

Answer 1

THEORY

Was a therapist, claimed the maternal deprivation hypothesis. Stated the maternal deprivation hypothesis. Maternal deprivation hypothesis -> children have a critical period in which they must receive love and care from their primary caregiver. If not the suffer from MD. Divorces can affect the CP as environment can be less loving so may cause MD.

Maternal deprivation may lead to difficulties in future relationships and may cause an individual to struggle to maintain relationships, causing them to change or end.

Evaluation ->

✔
✔

❌ His theory is too deterministic, - many people go on to have loving relationships in adulthood despite having bad attachments with caregivers during critical period. There have been contrasting findings where children who experienced maternal deprivation have gone on to have healthy adult relationships

❌ Bowlby ignores the role of other caregivers e.g. Fathers, Aunties/Uncles, Grandparents, Foster parents

Question 2

Hazan and Shaver (1987)

Answer 2

Aim ->
To investigate whether romantic love among adults shows the same attachment styles as those found between children and their parents.

Method ->
Newspaper survey, presented as a “love quiz”.
First 620 responses were analysed – 205 from men and 415 from women. 42% of participants were married and 31% were dating. Questions asked about issues such as fear of closeness, jealousy and obsessive preoccupation.

Results ->
Attachment styles in childhood are stable in adulthood and could be observed influencing romantic relationships in later life. Significant support to attachment theory - early relationships are fundamental to an individual’s subsequent ability to form stable relationships throughout life.

Conclusion ->
If a child’s relationships with its parents are disrupted in the critical period, because of the effect of the divorce on the parents’ behaviour towards the child, this could have long-term effects on that child’s future relationships.

Evaluation ->

✔ As the first attempt to link attachment style to adult relationships, this was a large-scale study and very successful.
✔

❌ Generalisability -> Different distributions of attachment style are found in different parts of the world, so any pattern here is likely to be culture-specific (even if ‘culture’ = most Western countries).
❌ There is no mention of causation - this is purely correlative.
❌ Low validity -> There is no way of knowing if the same individuals who report secure adult relationships were also securely attached as children. Although the results did in principle support the researchers’ continuity hypothesis of attachment styles through the lifespan by showing similar proportions for each group, they didn’t confirm it. Ppts could have lied or not remembered correctly. Without proper control assigning ppts into the correct groups, we can’t have full trust in the results.

Question 3

Duck (1992)

Answer 3

THEORY

Conducted a meta-analysis of various studies and found that there were many reasons for relationships ending: Marrying young, coming from different backgrounds, if they were poor, if they had many previous sexual partners, and if their parents were divorced.

There are many reasons for divorced parents causing future relationship issues:
It could be a learned behaviour, SCT states that we imitate adults and so, if we learned divorcing as a behaviour from our parents, divorce may be a more appealing solution to any issues.
Communication with a partner may be decreased because we might want to avoid the issues found in our parents’ relationships. Openness is a condition for growth (2) according to Rogers (1957) and so without it, relationships may break down.
? Your parents’ reasons for divorce could make it more likely that you will look for the same issues in your own relationship and become paranoid that your spouse is beginning to show behaviours that led to the break-up of your parents’ relationship, even if those behaviours aren’t really there.

Evaluation ->

✔ Identifies several reasons why a relationship may end or breakdown and offers explanations for why they have an impact.
✔

❌ It was a correlational study - can’t infer cause and effect.
❌ his study was a meta analysis - reduces validity as he did not gather data first hand and also had no control of the processes in the original studies.