Cultural variations in attachment, including van IJzendoorn.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to describe cultural variations in attachment, focusing on van IJzendoorn and Kroonenberg's meta-analysis, with evaluation. The exam skill is to report the findings precisely and to evaluate the methodology, especially the imposed-etic problem and the difference between a country and a culture.

The meta-analysis

A meta-analysis combines the results of many separate studies to produce an overall picture, which gives a large sample and more reliable conclusions than any single study. The headline finding is one of universality with variation: secure attachment was the modal (most common) type in all eight countries, which supports Bowlby's claim that attachment is innate and universal. The variation lay in the insecure types. Insecure-avoidant attachment was relatively common in individualist Western cultures (highest in Germany), which has been linked to child-rearing that values independence and discourages clinginess. Insecure-resistant attachment was relatively common in collectivist cultures (highest in Japan and Israel), which has been linked to child-rearing in which infants rarely experience separation from the mother. The single most important detail is that the variation within a country was about 1.5 times greater than the variation between countries, which warns against treating a whole country as one uniform culture.

Explaining the differences and evaluating

Differences may reflect child-rearing practices: German culture values independence (producing more avoidant classifications), while Japanese infants are rarely separated from their mothers, so the Strange Situation's separation episode causes unusually extreme distress (producing more resistant classifications, or even terminations of the procedure). This raises the key methodological criticism: the Strange Situation is an imposed etic, a tool developed in one culture (the USA) and applied as though it were a universal standard. If the procedure does not mean the same thing in Japan as in America, then the classifications may not be valid measures of attachment across cultures. A further issue is that comparing countries is not the same as comparing cultures, because each country contains many sub-cultures, and the within-country variation finding confirms this. Despite these limits, the consistent finding of secure attachment as the norm offers genuine support for the idea of a universal attachment system.