Section 3 : Attachment - Effects of Institutionalism

Question 1

What is privation

Answer 1

Where a child has never had an attachment to its mother or caregiver

Question 2

What is deprivation

Answer 2

Where an attachment was once formed but now is broken

Question 3

Who criticised the maternal deprivation hypothesis

Answer 3

• Rutter
• said Bowlby was confused with the term deprivation

Question 4

What did Rutter claim and where did evidence of this come from

Answer 4

• That the effects of maternal privation are more likely to be serious than the effects of maternal deprivation
• evidence comes from case studies of children who suffered difficult conditions or cruel treatment

Question 5

What was Curtiss 1977

Answer 5

• case of a girl who suffered extreme cruelty from her parents and never formed any attachments
• she was beaten, no chance to play with toys, strapped to a high chair most of her childhood
• discovered at 13 years old physically underdeveloped, only speak with animal-like sounds
• social and intellectual skills never seemed to fully develop

Question 6

What was the method Rutter et al 2007

Answer 6

• 111 Romanian orphans who were adopted by British families were compared with a group 52 UK adoptees and followed over a prolonged period
• some orphans were adopted before they were 6 months and some were older than 6 months
• each child was assessed at ages 4,6,11

Question 7

What was the results of Rutter et al 2007

Answer 7

• Romanian children who were younger than 6 months when they were adopted had same level of emotional development as other UK children who were adopted at the same age
• However Romanian orphans who were older than 6 months at adoption showed signs of insecure attachments and social problems
• the UK children who were older than 6 months at adoption didn’t show the same problems

Question 8

What was the conclusion of Rutter et al 2007

Answer 8

• effects of privation can be reversed if attachment starts to form before the age of 6 months
• long term effects are more permanent if attachment doesn’t start to occur within 6 months
• maternal deprivation on its own doesn’t cause permanent effects because the UK adopted children had been separated but didn’t show any problems

Question 9

What were the evaluations of Rutter et al 2007

Answer 9

• results with older children may be due to a lack of any stimulation in the orphanage
• longitudinal study so the results provide a better insight into the long term effects of privation
• however they collected mainly qualitative data which is more difficult to create generalised laws or theories from

Question 10

Rutter et al’s research was built upon what

Answer 10

Hodges and Tizard 1989

Question 11

What was the method of Hodges and Tizard

Answer 11

• longitudinal study
• studied 65 children placed in a residential nursery before they were 4 months old
• they hadn’t the opportunity to form close attachments with any of their caregivers
• by the age of 4 some of the children had returned to their birth mother, some had been adopted and some stayed in the nursery

Question 12

What was the results of Hodges and Tizard 1989

Answer 12

• at 16 years old, the adopted group had strong family relationships although a control group of the children from a normal home environment had a weaker peer relationship
• those who stayed in the nursery or who returned to their mothers showed poorer relationships with family and peers than those who were adopted

Question 13

What was the conclusion of Hodges and Tizard 1989

Answer 13

Children can recover from early maternal privation if they are in a good quality, loving environment, although their social development may not be as good as children who have never suffered privation

Question 14

Give the evaluations of Hodges and Tizard 1989

Answer 14

• natural experiment, high ecological validity
• sample quite small and more than 20 of the children couldn’t be found at the end of the study
• hard to generalise results
• lack of stimulation due to lots of institutionalised children are often underfed and malnourished
• these factors could influence their behaviour rather than lack of attachment itself

Question 15

Long term effects of institutionalisation includes….

Answer 15

• affectionless psychopathy
• anaclitic depression (involving appetite loss, sleeplessness, impaired social and intellectual growth)
• deprivation dwarfism (infants are physically underdeveloped due to emotional deprivation)
• delinquency (minor crimes committed by youths)
• reduced intelligence (infants dont develop intellectually as fast as their peers)