Studying attachment is not straightforward. One way is to observe the children in the home setting, relating to mother, father or other children. But can the essential elements of home life be translated into a standard laboratory setting for controlled scientific study? After conducting extensive observations of parents and children at home, a student of Bowlby's, Mary Ainsworth, devised such a procedure. called the strange situation which places the child under some stress.
It has become the most widely used standardized way to assess the quality of a child's attachment to their caregiver. Here the researchers are recording how 14-month-old Lisa responds in this attractive but unfamiliar setting. How will she react to a stranger? What will happen when her mother leaves the room and when she returns? It's Lisa's behaviour when her mother returns, what psychologists call the reunion, that they are particularly interested in.
Most importantly is to look for the type of balance that a child strikes between an attachment need and on the other hand to explore the play material. Once Lisa has settled down to play, a stranger enters the room and sits in the chair reading a magazine. After a couple of minutes, the stranger attempts to interact with Lisa. Soon after, Lisbeth gets a cue to leave the room. The stranger tries to comfort Lisa, but in vain.
Lisbeth comes back into the room and the camera records how Lisa reacts. Now the first part of the procedure is over and Lisbeth settles Lisa down again. The stranger leaves them alone together.
And soon after Lisbeth goes too. Lisa is on her own. Her distress is plain to see. Once again, the efforts of the stranger to console Lisa are to no avail. But Lisbeth manages to calm her almost at once, and shortly afterwards the observation ends.
Lisa showed outward signs of what's called secure attachment. Can these signs give us an idea of what's going on inside? the child's mind?
John Bowlby used the idea of an internal working model to describe this. Howard Steele, another attachment researcher, explains what this means. Some people express the internal working model in the following terms, that the child who behaves securely, if you like, in the strain situation, has a model of the parent.
as available and loving, and a complementary model of the self as worthy of that love. When data from a number of strange situations are coded and analysed, secure attachments are usually found in about 60% of the cases. Another child, one year old Eva, clearly behaves differently from Lisa during the first part of the procedure, after she's been left alone for a short time.
She's first glancing at the mother, then glancing again at the mother. I would expect now that she would seek proximity. A little bit distracted by the stranger. This takes a long time before she's oriented at the mother again, isn't it?
Yeah, although she looks... But only shortly. She's clearly distressed, so you would think that she would seek proximity, but she's just... She remains playing with the ball.
So more or less focused on the play material. Not letting her emotions go and seek proximity to the mother, get a reassurance. Coding and classifying behavior in the strange situation is not always straightforward.
Eva behaved differently in the second reunion to how she'd done in the first. Some of her reactions show signs of what Ainsworth describes as insecure avoidant attachment. On the other hand...
How are avoidant attachments represented in the internal working model? This is a mother who has communicated to his or her child, if you're distressed, try to keep grips on it. Try to have a stiff upper lip. Try to pull yourself together. Try to be independent.
Try to learn to deal with it on your own. Although the strange situation is used extensively in attachment research, some other psychologists who have studied children's relationships have reservations. I think the problem is making inferences about the relationship from how children behave in the strange situation, because it is exactly that, a strange situation.
Because the tricky thing is, what does the situation mean to the child? It means something probably very different for a child who's been in daycare since early in the first year, and the same is true for children from different cultures, for whom this experience... may have very different meaning again. Despite such criticisms, this 20-minute strange situation procedure is still widely used and believed to indicate the relationship between the child and, in this case, the mother. It is considered to highlight important qualities of the attachment and show significant links with other aspects of the child's experience and behaviour.
The child's representation of his or her relationship with mother from the first year of life... Carries over to the child's behavior with peers at two, three, four years of age such that children who look securely attached in a strange situation to mother at one year are getting on better with peers in the preschool, able to work cooperatively on tasks, resolve dilemmas, conflicts that emerge, often without resorting to the teacher.