The ways in which Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg tried to overcome problems by previous studies of cross-cultural patterns were firstly by using large sample sizes that can therefore be better generalised to whole populations and provide more reliable results. They also tried to examine whether or not the differences between cultures were any greater than the existing inter-cultural differences. Finally they used the use of the American ‘standard’ distribution of attachment types (20% type A, 70% type B, 10% type C) which are based on a narrow sample themselves and therefore aren’t very standardized at all.
The aim of the investigation was to investigate the different reported rates of infant attachment types in a range of cultures. The meta-analysis was the use of the Strange Situation, only mother-infant pairs and infants were classified into A, B, or C. The studies tried to eliminate any other variables that couldn’t be controlled. These included any special groups of children. These groups included those with Down’s syndrome, any children with less than 35 pairs and any children over the age of 2. The total number of samples was 32 from eight countries and represented 1990 Strange Situation classifications.
The data was analyzed in 3 ways. The first was to see whether in each sample there was a pattern of distribution of children over different attachment types, the second was by the comparison of the extent of intra and inter-cultural differences in terms of overall variation and also to evaluate specific similarities and differences of the samples eg, were the proportions of A, B and C similar?
In all samples from all countries, except for Germany, the modal attachment type was B. This is one of the similarities between cultures. The USA sample, however, can be seen as very misleading. This is because while the average findings closely resemble the ‘global’ figure, the sample is very varied. This could be argued that the reason there is so much variation is because the US sample takes up over half of the total number of participants within the study, making it culturally biased which could therefore skew the results. This also brings the issue of unfair distribution.
Intra and inter-cultural comparisons produced some interesting findings. Firstly, one of the German samples was different to another (Berlin) as this sample was from an Israeli kibbutzim sample. Secondly, the Japanese sample from Tokyo was more like one of the US samples than the other. Lastly, the Israeli city sample was more like one of the US samples than the other Israeli (kibbutzim) sample.
Using all of the data, Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg found that the intra-cultural variation was nearly one and a half times the size of the inter-cultural variation. This means that there bigger differences within cultures than there were between them. In Germany and the USA, intra-cultural variation is very large, whereas between the Netherlands and Japan there is very little variation. The Japanese and Israeli samples contributed the most to cross-cultural differences.
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rebs96 (student)
