Strange Situation Flashcards
What was Ainsworth’s method?
- Original study was conducted on 100 middle class American mothers and their children
- Psychologists observed the infants behaviour in the controlled space over 8 episodes
- These episodes invloved measuring the infant’s reaction to a stranger or their caregiver approaching/leaving
What behaviours were used to judge attachment?
Clue: P.R.E.S.S
- Proximity seeking: whether or not the child seeks to stay fairly close to the caregiver
- Reunion behaviour: the infants reaction to caregiver returning after a short period of separation
- Exploration & secure-base behaviour: how well a child feels confident to explore their environment using their caregiver as a secure-base - a point of contact that makes them feel safe
- Stranger/ Separation anxiety: whether the infant displays signs of anxiety e.g. crying due to presence of a stranger or absence if their caregiver
What was the most dominant attachment type found?
Type B - Secure Attachment
- 60% of infants studied
- have cooperative interactions with their caregiver
- tend to explore happily but regualrly go back to caregiver, treating them as a secure base
- show mild separation/stranger anxiety
- require and accept comfort in reunion behaviour
What was the second most popular attachment type?
Type A - Insecure Avoidant
- 30% of the infants
- don’t seek proximity or show secure base behaviour
- explore freely but avoid interaction and intimacy with others
- show no separation/stranger anxiety
- make little effort in reunion behaviour
What was the least popular type?
Type C - Insecure Resistant
- 10% of infants studied
- AKA ambivalent attachment due to unsure nature of child’s behaviour
- seek and resist intimacy and social interaction
- seek greater proximity than other types and tend not to explore
- show extreme stranger/separation anxiety
- resist caregiver upon reunion
What were Ainsworth’s conclusions?
- There are 3 main attachment types
- most american infants are securely attached
- there is an association between the mother’s behaviour and the infant’s attachment
- mothers having high social sensitivity causes infants to become securely attached
- being insensitive and unresponsive to infant signals causes them to become insecurely attached
What is a strength of the Strange Situation?
- A strength of the SS is that the observations have high reliability
- Ainsworth found almost perfect agreement (0.94) when rating exploratory behaviour of the infants observed
- This is a strength because it demonstrates that the observations had high reliability as there was almost unanimous greement among observers
- Observations such as SS are highly based on subjective interpretation, thus having high inter-rater reliability is crucial for valid results
- Therefore the SS increases in validity
How does Takahashi weaken the SS?
- A weakness of SS is that it is culturally biased
- Takahashi found that the test doesn’t work in Japan as Japanese mothers are rarely separated from their children. Thus, for the japanese, a mother leaving her child with a stranger is not a realistic everyday scenario
- In fact, infants became so distressed when their mother left that for 90% of them the study had to be stopped
- This is a weakness as it shows that the SS only reflects norms of American culture and doesn’t consider cross-cultural variations in child rearing practices. As such it takes an etic approach and is culturally biased
- Thus SS decreases in validity as a tool to measure attachment
How do Main and Solomon weaken the SS?
- A weakness of the SS is that it doesn’t account for all attachment types
- Main and Solomon analysed over 200 SS tapes and proposed a 4th attachment type - Type D: Insecure disorganised
- This was characterised by a lack of consistent behaviour and attachment. When dealing with stress and separation they showed very strong attachment which was suddenly followed by avoidance/looking scared of their caregiver
- This is a weakness because it shows that Ainsworth’s research doesn’t account for this attachment type and so is too narrow and lacks sufficient detail
- Thus, due to providing an incomplete explanation of attachment types, the SS decreases in validity
How do Main and Weston weaken the SS?
- Another weakness of the SS is that it doesn’t account for infants having different attachment types with different caregivers
- The SS aims to measure the attachment type an infant has in general but only focuses on one relationship - infant and mother thus giving a limited picture of a child’s attachment behaviour
- Main and Weston found that childen behaved differently based on the parent they were with
- This is a weakness because although Ainsworth was trying to measure the attachment types that exist between caregivers and infants she actually only measured attachment types infants form to a mother
- Thus SS lacks internal validity
