Evaluate the 'Strange Situation'.

        As a group, babies explored the playroom and the toys more enthusiastically when the mother was present than either after the stranger entered or when the mother was absent. However, Ainsworth was interested in the unexpected variety of reunion behaviours. This is because these behaviours form an important part of the baby’s attachment to the mother. These behaviours were classified in terms of 3 types of attachment:

1. Anxious-avoidant (type A); 15%. These children typically ignored the mother and showed indifference towards her. Their play was unaltered by whether she was present or not. They showed few signs of stress when the mother left the room and actively ignored her or even avoided her when she returned. They reacted to the mother and stranger in similar ways. They were most distressed when left on their own.
2. Securely-attached (type B); 70%. They played happily whilst mother was present, whether or not stranger was also present. They became very upset when mother left, and their play was seriously disrupted. When she returned they wanted immediate comfort from her. They then quickly calmed down and continued playing. They also treated the mother and stranger differently.
3. Anxious-resistant (type C); 15%. These children were fussy and wary even when mother was present. These children cried much more than the others. When the mother left, these children became extremely distressed. When she returned they wanted contact with her, but also at the same time showed anger towards her.

Ainsworth found that the most important factor that determines the quality of a child’s attachment to their mother is the mother’s sensitivity. A sensitive mother sees things from her child’s point of view, she would interpret it’s signals correctly and respond to its needs. She is accessible, comforting, understanding and accepting. It is sensitive mothers who have securely attached children, and insensitive mothers who have insecurely attached children.

        

According to Lamb et al. (1985), the Strange Situation is

“… the most powerful and useful procedure ever available for the study of socioemotional development in infancy”. Ainsworth et al.’s classification system is generally regarded as very reliable and has been used in a large number of studies in which attachment has been the major dependent variable.

A child’s attachment style my change though as shown by Vaughn et al (1979). These are not the only attachment types that have been identified. Main (1991) found that in a series of more recent studies (for example Main et al. 1985), many children proved to be unclassifiable in terms of type A, B and C, they showed a mixture of disorientated and disorganised behaviours. This type was classified as type D behaviour called – insecure-disorganised/disorientated (Main, 1991).

        One interpretation of attachment type (which is based on the Strange Situation) is that it measures a fixed characteristic of the child. But if the family circumstances change, for example mothers stress levels rise, this child may be classed differently. This couldn’t happen if attachment types were a permanent characteristic. Similarly, attachments to mothers and fathers are independent. So one child could be securely attached to its mother, but insecurely attached to its father. This shows that attachment patterns derived from the Strange Situation reflect qualities of distinct relationships, rather than characteristics of the child.

        Cross-cultural studies have also revealed important differences both within and between cultures. In an early study which didn’t include the Strange Situation, Ainsworth found very similar patterns of infant distress on separation from the mother among the Ganda people of Uganda and among American infants. Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg (1998) carried out a major review of 32 worldwide studies using the strange situation, involving over 2000 infants. They found that;

1. There are marked intercultural differences in the distribution of types A, B and C. E.g. in 1 of 2 Japanese studies, there was a complete absence of type A but a high proportion of type C, while the other was much more consistent with the Ainsworth et al. pattern.
2. There seems to be a pattern of cross-cultural differences, whereby type B is the most common,  type A is relatively more common in Western European countries and type C is relatively more common in Israel and Japan.

These differences may be due to differences in the meaning that the strange situation ahs of participants in different cultural settings. This also will account for the different causes of distress. An example of this is that Japanese children are rarely separated from their mothers, so that her departure is the most distressing episode, while for the children raised in Israel kibbutzim it is the entrance of the stranger which is the main source of distress. Also some studies have not always used the same identical, standard procedure, as when episodes 3 and 5 were missed out in one Japanese study as the mothers were so uneasy (Durkin, 1995). The strange situation is the most widely used method for assessing infant attachment to a caregiver. However Lamb et al. (1984) have criticised it for being highly artificial, for being extremely limited in terms of the amount of data that is actually gathered and for failing to take into account the mother’s behaviour. Its ethical status should also be pointed out: it is designed to see how infants react to stress, which is deliberately produced in the form of;

1. An unfamiliar physical environment
2. Separation from mother
3. Contact with stranger which becomes more intrusive

The contact becomes intrusive as in episode 3 the stranger actually approaches the child prior to the mother leaving and in episode 7 she interacts with the child in the mother’s absence. It is true that mothers do leave their children for brief periods in different settings, often with strangers, e.g. babysitters. However, any method used in research which deliberately exposes children to stress is ethically questionable.

        The strange situation has also been criticised for not being realistic. This is because it is not true to life, and it does not reflect everyday situations. It may not actually be possible to generalise the findings to real-life settings. This also means that the strange situation lacks ecological validity. The classification of attachment may actually reflect the strange situation and not the actual attachment.

        Not all evaluations of the strange situations have been negative though.  The strange situation is easily and efficiently replicated. As it is a systematic procedure, the experiment can be repeated under the same conditions. This means that in all experiments the infants are responding to a similar situation. Differences in their behaviour are not then due to differences in experiment.

        The experiment gives lots of different measures for assessing the attachment of a child to its mother. This is important as a single measure could give a false impression.  Research also shows that different types of attachment may have different effects on a child’s development. If this is so then it gives a real point to studying and classifying attachment patterns from 12 to 18 months.