Cultural Variation

Cross Cultural studies of attachment

Van Ljzendoorn & Kroonenberg

  • meta analysis of numerous strange situations experiments conducted in different countries
  • looking at proportions of secure, insecure-avoidant & insecure-resistant attachment across range of countries to assess cultural variation
  • also look at differences within same countries to get idea of variation within a culture

meta analysis - where researcher looks at findings from a number of different studies in order to reach a general conclusion

Vanljzendoorn & Kroonenberg
Procedure

  • meta analysis of other strange situation studies
  • all selected studies had:
    • observed only mother-infant pairs (not fathers or other cargivers)
    • classified into 3 attachment types
    • A, B, C
  • excluded any other studies:
    • looked at children with special needs
    • less than 35-mother-baby pairs
    • using children older than 2 years
  • studies conducted in 8 countries - 15 in USA
  • overall studies yielded results for 1,990 children
  • data used for these 32 studies was meta-analysed

Findings (click on to read)
Country No. studies secure avoidant resistant
Great Britain 1 75% 22.2% 2.8%
US 18 64.8% 21.1% 14.1%
Japan 2 67.7% 5.2% 27.1%
West Germany 3 66.6% 35.3% 8.1%

secure attachments
-most common form in all cultures surveyed

  • however, proportion varied from 75% in Britain to 50% in China

Insecure-resistant

  • individualist cultures rates of insecure-resistant were similar to Ainsworth's original same (all under 14%)
  • collectivist cultures (China, Japan & Israel) rates above 25%

Insecure-Avoidant

  • mostly commonly found in Germany & least common in Japan

Van Ljzendoorn & Kroonenberg (1988)

  • also found differences within cultures
  • e.g. 1 of the Japanese studies showed no avoidant attachment, whereas second found around 20% which is similar to Ainsworth's findings
  • e.g. USA 1 study found only 46% securely attached compared to 1 sample as high as 90%
  • demonstrates that it is an over-simplification to assume that all children are brought up in exactly the same way within a country/culture

Collectivist Culture:

  • emphasis on group effort & cooperation
  • focus on interpersonal development of infants
  • more favourable reaction to obedience & social behaviour
  • less anti-social behaviour

Individualist Cultures

  • emphasis on personal achievement
  • focus on depending initiative in infants
  • mothers react favourably to independence
  • more anti-social behaviour

EVALUATION

!STRENGTH!

indigenous researcher

  • most studies conducted by indigenous researchers
  • these are researchers from the same cultural background as participant
  • this kind of research means many of potential problems in cross cultural research can be avoided - such as researchers misunderstanding of language used by participants or having difficulties communicating instructions to them
  • difficulties can include bias as 1 of one's nations stereotype of another
  • means there is an excellent chance that researchers & participants communicated successfully - enhancing validity of data collected

HOWEVER

-not been true of all cross-cultural attachment research

  • e.g. Morelli & Tronick (1991) were outsiders from America when they studied child-rearing & patterns of attachment in Efe of Zaire
    • their data might have been affected by difficulties in gathering data from participants outside their own culture
    • means that the data from some countries might have been affected by bias & difficulty in cross cultural communication

!LIMITATION!

confounding variables

  • impact of confounding variables on findings
    studies conducted in different countries are not usually matched for methodology when they are compared in reviews/meta-analysis
  • sample characteristics (e.g. poverty, social class * urban.rural make up) can confound results, as can age of participants studies in different countries
  • environmental variables may also differ between studies & confound results
  • means that looking at attachment behaviour in different non-matched studies conducted in different countries may not tell us anything about cross-cultural patterns of attachment

!LIMITATION!

imposed etic

-trying to impose a test designed for 1 cultural context to another context

  • cross-cultural psychology includes ideas of emic (cultural uniqueness) & etic (cross-cultural univesality)
  • imposed etic occurs when we assume an idea or technique that works in 1 cultural context will work in another
  • means behaviours measured by strange situation may not have same meanings in different cultural contexts, & comparing them across cultures is meaningfulness