Ainsworth’s ‘Strange Situation’. Types of attachment: secure,…

The idea

A controlled observation built to measure attachment quality. A baby and carer enter an unfamiliar playroom for eight short episodes behind a two-way mirror, with a stranger entering and the carer leaving and returning twice. Observers score five behaviours: proximity seeking, secure-base exploration, stranger anxiety, separation anxiety and, most telling, the reunion response. Ainsworth found roughly 66% secure (explores, easily comforted), 22% insecure-avoidant (little distress, ignores the carer on return) and 12% insecure-resistant (distressed, seeks then rejects comfort). Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg meta-analysed 32 studies in eight countries: secure led everywhere, avoidant peaked in Germany, resistant in Japan, and variation within countries was about 1.5 times that between them.

What earns the marks

• Procedure identified as a controlled observation in a laboratory playroom, with eight episodes of about three minutes.
• The five behavioural categories scored, with reunion behaviour named as the key indicator.
• Secure attachment described: moderate separation and stranger anxiety, uses carer as a secure base, easily comforted on reunion.
• Insecure-avoidant described: low stranger and separation anxiety, avoids contact at reunion.
• Insecure-resistant described: high anxiety, resists comfort and shows conflicting approach and rejection at reunion.
• Ainsworth's proportions quoted for the three types.
• Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg's meta-analysis: 32 studies, eight countries, secure most common in every sample, most avoidant in Germany, most resistant in Japan.
• The within-culture variation finding, and the conclusion that child-rearing practices, not nationality, drive the differences.
• Evaluation: high inter-rater reliability, imposed etic and culture-bound criteria, and the disorganised type added by Main and Solomon.

Common mistakes and how to put them right

• Treating the Strange Situation as an experiment and naming an independent variable, when it is a controlled observation.

• Describing insecure-resistant as avoidant and the reverse.

  Put it right: The resistant baby wants contact and then fights it.

• Reporting cultural variations as differences between countries when the study's own finding is that variation within a country is larger.

• Writing that Japanese infants are insecure, rather than that a procedure built on Western child-rearing misclassifies them.

• Listing percentages with no comment on what they show, which scores knowledge but no evaluation.

Exam tips

• Reunion behaviour is the discriminator - say what the baby does when the carer comes back for every type you name.
• For a scenario, match the described behaviour to a type and justify it with the specific behaviour in the stem, not with a definition.
• Cultural variation questions reward the imposed etic argument by name, plus one concrete example such as Takahashi's Japanese sample.
• Quote the proportions to one figure each; approximate numbers used accurately are credited, invented precision is not.