Psychology - cross cultural variations

Findings: They found that Great Britain had the highest percentage of securely attached people (75%), Israel has the highest percentage of resistant attached people (..) and West Germany had the highest percentage of avoidant attached people(..)

Conclusions: They found that secure attachment is the ‘norm’ – it is the most common form of attachment. Van & Kroogenberg explained the effects of mass media which spread ideas about parenting so that children all over the world are exposed to similar differences.

Evaluation: Van & kroogenberg are armchair researchers and never experimented themselves, they simply looked at what everyone else had found and drew conclusions from it, which are not reliable as they collected data from 18 studies in USA and only 1 study in Great Britain. This would have been an unfair collection of data.

However, the validity of these conclusions can be questioned as infants in Japan rarely leave their mother so when put in the strange situation, they would appear to be more distressed as it is an unusual situation for them; making them appear more insecurely attached.