Cultural Variations in Attachment, including Van ljzendoorn (AQA A Level Psychology)

• One of the biggest criticisms aimed at Ainsworth's original study was that it was ethnocentric, only using a US sample
• Over the next few decades, the Strange Situation was replicated across other countries and the data were examined to see just how much of Ainsworth's work could be applied to other countries and cultures
• The largest, and arguably most famous, was conducted by a Dutch psychologist: Van Ijzendoorn

Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg: Cultural difference in attachment

• Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg(1988) conducted a meta-analysis of strange situation experiments that other researchers had conducted across the globe
• A meta-analysis is when you take the work of several other researchers and combine their data/findings to come to conclusions of your own
• The use of meta-analysis here was an advantage as it meant that Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg did not have the time and costs associated with travel as well as cultural and language barriers
• They took 32 studies from 8 countries to gain an idea of attachment types in other cultures

Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg: The findings

Country	No of Studies	Type B (%)	Type A (%)	Type C (%)
Great Britain	1	75	22	3
Germany	3	57	35	8
Netherlands	4	67	26	7
Sweden	1	74	22	4
Japan	2	68	5	27
Israel	2	64	7	29
United States	18	65	21	14
China	1	50	25	25
MEAN		65	21	14

What do the findings mean?

There are four main findings that come from the meta-analysis of Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg:

• Secure attachment (B) is the most commonly found attachment type in all countries studied
• Insecure Avoidant (A) is the second most common attachment type in Western/industrialised/individualistic societies
• Insecure Resistant (C) is the second most common attachment type in non-Western/non-industrialised/collectivist societies
• There is more difference within a culture than between cultures

The last finding means that the countries are all so relatively similar it is hard to tell them apart just by looking at a snapshot of findings

Think about it this way

If the sound were turned down on the strange situation tapes and there were no clues as to the culture/country they were filmed in, would you be able to tell what the country was just by looking at the videos of the infants?

However, if you watched a day of strange situation films from say, Sweden, you would see all three attachment types and so there would be variety

There is more diversity inside the cultures than between them

Evaluating Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg

Strengths

• The method is quicker and cheaper than alternatives
• Meta-analysis allows the researchers to obtain data from countries where language and cultural barriers may have been an issue i.e. China and Japan
• The study is reliable as it can easily be replicated
• As the research has a large sample from a variety of places,  it can be said to be representative and, therefore, generalisable

Limitations 

• It is hard to check the validity of some of the studies as the researchers have no way of knowing if the data was collected in a scientific manner
• There are a lot of countries, as well as continents, missing including Africa and a lot of Asia
• So can we really generalise to all cultures?
• There is an imbalance of studies used: There are so many for the US that those results are also the mean for the whole study
• The Chinese study only had 25 infants, so we are using a tiny sample to represent around 20% of the global population
• Takahashi found that Japanese infants were often seen as Type C as they were rarely left by their PCG and so the strange situation was terrifying for them
• This raises the question: If the strange situation is not valid in Japan due to child-rearing differences, is it valid elsewhere?