Cross-cultural research into attachment types.
The Strange Situation procedure has had a profound impact within developmental psychology and has become a recognised and validated method to assess individual differences in attachment types. The procedure has been used in a variety of cultural settings to identify whether patterns of attachments appear to be universal or are subject to cultural influences. One of the most commonly cited cross-cultural studies which uses the Strange Situation procedure was conducted by Van Ijzendoorn & Kroonenberg’s in 1988 (which is on the key study page). Another is Takahashi, below:
Takahashi (1990) replicated the Strange Situation with 60 middle class Japanese infants & mothers using the same standardised procedure and behavioural categories. Takahashi’s observation revealed distinct cultural differences in how the infants responded to the 8 stages of the procedure. The findings were as follows:
0% insecure-avoidant. Infants became severely distressed in the “infant alone step”; this situation was quite unnatural and broke cultural norms for the infants
32% insecure-resistant
68% secure
90% of infant-alone steps had to be stopped due to excessive infant anxiety.
A weakness of the research is that it could be seen as unethical – It could be argued that Takahashi’s research was unethical as the harm that the procedure caused exceeded what infants would be exposed to in their day-to-day lives meaning that it exceeded undue risk. As Japanese infants are rarely separated from their primary caregivers, the infant-alone step induced stress that they would not normally encounter and so the level of harm can be considered unjustifiable. Despite this being the case, the researchers did stop infant-alone steps prematurely in an attempt to protect infants from further harm.