Whats an argument for cultural variations in attachment?
I assume that you’re doing a question on whether attachment is universal, so evidence for cultural variations in attachment include: 1. Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg’s meta analysis of cross cultural studies. 2. Grossmann and Grossmann’s (1991) study of German infants. 3. Tronick et al’s (1992) study of infants from the Efe in Africa 4. Fox’s (1991) study of infants in Israeli Kibbutzim. 5. Takahashi (1990) study of Japanese infants. Very simply, this debate has come about because Ainsworth’s strange situation found that Type B (secure) babies were the happiest and therefore suggested that this is the ‘best’ attachment relationships to have. However, Ainsworth used middle class children from the USA, so many researchers argued that you could only apply the results to western (American) culture. The researchers above found that the ‘ideal’ attachment types varied across different countries, suggesting that Ainsworth’s strange situation was culturall biased and therefore not universal (
