outline and evaluate Bowlby’s 44 thieves' study (8) Flashcards
outline
Bowlby (1944) identified 88 children from a care home in London using naturally occurring differences.
The experiment included 44 children who identified themselves as thieves and were compared to 44 other troubled children.
Using case histories, Bowlby investigated whether the children had experienced any long-term emotional separation from their primary attachment figure during the first 2.5 years of their life and were given IQ tests.
He found 14 of the children showed affectionless psychopathy and of these, 12 had experienced long-term separation (maternal deprivation) from their PAF whilst none of the control showed affectionless psychopathy.
All children who had experienced maternal deprivation showed lower IQ scores.
In conclusion, long-term separation from the PAF during the critical period causes poor cognitive development and poor emotionless development.
limit 1
A limitation of Bowlby’s research is that it is low in population validity, which is when the findings cannot be generalised to wider populations, decreasing external validity of research.
This is because the research used a small sample of just 88 children from the same care home.
A large-scale replication of Bowlby’s study with 500 children found maternally deprived children didn’t demonstrate criminality or difficulties forming close relations.
This contradicts the maternal deprivation hypothesis by suggesting that emotional separation from a PAF doesn’t necessarily cause poor emotional or social development.
limit 2
Another limitation is that it has difficulty in establishing cause and effect which is when it is impossible to establish a causal relationship between 2 variables because there is no control over any variable, lowering internal validity.
This is because the research simply showed a positive correlation between maternal deprivation and negative behaviour so we cannot be sure that long-term separation from the PAF caused these emotional, social and cognitive difficulties.
Indeed, the children recorded as thieves may have shown this behaviour because they had been exposed to a subculture that rewarded criminal behaviour.
