Strange Situation

Strange Situation

1. Aim:To produce a method of assessing quality of attachment between mother and child.

2. Method: Middle class infants and mothers contacted through paeditricians in private practices.

   • Were observed longitudinally from birth, prior to the experiment
   • Controlled observation, classed as the observation technique
   • Observing infants with mothers during a set of predetermined activities
   • All sessions took 3 minutes apart from the first one
   • The steps included child being introduced to the room with toys , being left alone, being approached by stranger, with mother returning to comfort the child.

3. Observers recorded the following

   • The infants willingmess to explore- whether the infant uses their mother as a safe base.
   • Seperation Anxiety- the level of unease shown by the infant when the caregiver leaves
   • Stranger Anxiety- the infant's response to the presence of the stranger.
   • Reunion anxiety- the way the caregiver was greeted by the infant on their return

4. Strengths

   • Methodology
     • Due to controlled nature of the observation it's easy to pelicate the study to check for reliabilty
     • Aspects of Strange situation that make it easy to replicate is the method used
     • For example Warter replicated the Strange situation in Germany and found that 78% of children they studied had same attachment type at ages 1 and 6
     • This is a strength because it shows that the Strange Situation techniques are reliable. This is because the attachment type was shown to be consistent across different occassions
   • Supporting Research
     • Cantero and Cerezo observed 112 Spanish mothers from age 5-15 months
     • It found that securely attached infants had more sensitive mothers
     • Insecure Avoidant infants recieved controlling or rejecting parenting
     • Insecure Resistant infants were more associated with the lack of responsiveness from mother
     • This provides support for the suggestion of the sensitivity of the mother affecting attachment type and demonstrates reliabilty of the strange situation.
       • Cross cultural Research
         • Cantero,Cerezo and Wartner both carry out the research in different countries
         • This is a good thing as it reduces the likelihood that Ainsworth's suggestion of attachment types and the type of parenting in ethnocentric

5. Weaknesses

   • Lacks Validity
     • Lacks population validity because initially the study was only taken place in America
       • Lacks ecological Validity because there are unnatural settings.
       • Lacks internal validity because it's only a snapshot of the child and mother's relationship; may not be valid as baby may not always act like this
         • This is a weakness because we can't generalise the results outside of the population. Also in a different situation on a different day the child may show a different attachment type.
           • Therefore the results cannot be seen to be an accurate measurement of attachment types
   • Ethical Issues
     • The observation took place in an unfamiliar place to the child in which their mother left them and a stranger approached
       • Likely to break the ethical issue of protection of participants because the children put under a stressful situation
         • This is a problems with ethics as it makes it harder to gain ethical approval in order to replicate the research. Without being able to replicate Ainsworth's work it's hard to show reliability in results