Cultural Variations

Due to the fact that the ways that people bring up their children can be very different all over the world as we share different attitudes, values and beliefs etc. People work on developing different skills and qualities, so attachments formed can be different. For instance, countries like Germany value personal independence and achievement more, whereas close relationship between people is valued more in Japan.

Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg carried out a meta-analysis that gathers and analyses data from many studies carried out by other researchers of 32 separate studies in eight different countries using Ainsworth's ‘Strange Situation' to find out about attachments types in different cultures. Participants were classified into three groups. Generally, Type B (secure attachment) was most common in all 8 countries, with Type C (insecure resistant) being least common. Out of all the countries, type C was more common in China and Japan. The highest Type A (insecure avoidant) attachment was found in Germany but very rare in Japan. The lowest proportion of Type B (secure attachments) was found in China and the highest in Great Britain. Their results thus showed how popular each type of attachment was in each of these 8 countries compared to each other.

However, there are many limitations to their analysis. One reason is because they did not review an equal amount of studies from each country in their meta-analysis. For instance, they reviewed 18 studies using Americans but only used 2 studies using the Japanese and 1 study using the Chinese. This is problematic as the Japan and China studies could not have been generalized to the whole country itself due to the sample being smaller compared to America, thus meaning they could have only represented a smaller part of each country. This reduces the reliability of their analysis' results, making us unsure as to whether the findings are accurate or not.

A further limitation of their analysis is that the results could be socially inappropriate and sensitive in the fact that it could be seen as judging parenthood in other cultures.