here are some personal questions do you have a trusting lasting relationship and feel able to share your feelings with your romantic partner or are you unwilling to share your thoughts and feelings with others and struggle to form intimate and close relationships or perhaps are you a bit clingy in relationships worry your romantic Partners going to leave you and are you devastated when a relationship ends all of this relates to your attachment type what's yours secure avoidant resistant let's find out hey everyone welcome back to buried in mind in this video we're going to explore ainsworth's strained situation and the different attachment types we have seen that forming an attachment really matters but if attachment really does matter how do we measure it how can we identify the type of attachment that we have and so Along Came Mary Ainsworth at one point in her life she worked at the famous Tavistock Clinic in London during the 1950s with none other than John bolby later when she returned to the USA she developed her method of studying attachment which became known as the strange situation the strange situation is a controlled observation designed to assess the quality of the child attachment to their caregiver in this strange situation a mother and infant enter an unfamiliar playroom with the child's Behavior being observed through a one-way mirror and just like with any observation there are behavioral categories these are the specifically defined behaviors that are being observed to judge the quality of the attachment these included proximity seeking how closely the infant stays to the caregiver exploration and secure base Behavior how much the child explores the new room using the mother as a safe place to explore from stranger anxiety how the child behaves when a stranger enters the room and tries to interact with them separation anxiety how the child behaves when their mother leaves the room and responds to reunion how the child behaves when the mother returns after being separated for a short period of time in ageless research her participants were 100 middle class American infants aged between 12 and 18 months at the beginning each child entered the room with their mother where there was a child's chair surrounded with toys as well as two other chairs the infant's Behavior was observed using these behavioral categories during a set of predetermined activities referred to as episodes there were eight episodes in total with episodes two to eight each lasting for three minutes here's what happened episode 1 the mother and the child enter the playroom episode 2 the child is then encouraged to explore and play with the toys episode 3 Australia danger enters the room and attempts to interact with the child episode 4 then the mother leaves while the strange is present episode 5 the mother then re-enters the room and the stranger leaves episode 6 the mother then leaves again so the child is now on their own episode 7 The Stranger returns and episode 8 the mother returns and interacts with their child from her observations she identified three attachment types secure attachment insecure avoidant and insecure resistant also known as insecure ambivalent you can describe each attachment type using the behavioral categories from the strange situation a secure attachment is seen in the child using their mother as a safe base from which to explore the unfamiliar environment checking in with her regularly they also show moderate separation and moderate stranger anxiety and when the mother Returns the child shows job they are pleased to see their mother and are easily comforted in her presence this secure attachment is thought to develop from parents who are sensitive and responsive to the needs of their child in other words the child feels safe and secure in the presence of their caregiver because they know that they're going to take care of them and meet their needs in contrast an insecure avoidant attachment is seen in the child exploring the unfamiliar environment but not returning to the mother and so not using her as a safe base the child shows low separation and strange anxiety they are unconcerned when their mother leaves and when the mother Returns the child shows no joy they show little reaction and often ignores their mother they're indifferent it's thought that an insecure avoidant attachment develops from caregivers not responding to a child attempts to seek Comfort during times of distress and so the child learns to avoid seeking comfort from them as an adult insecure avoidant Behavior can be seen in being emotionally and avoiding Intimacy in relationships and with an insecure resistant attachment the child shows little willingness to explore they tend to stay close to the mother and are clingy the child shows High separation and strange anxiety they show intense distress when their mother leaves and when the mother Returns on the one hand the child shows little Joy being not easily comforted by their mother because she's left but they also reject the mother's attempts to comfort them they are ambivalent they have mixed feelings it's thought that insecure resistant attachments develop from inconsistent behaviors from the caregiver the unpredictability of the caregiver's behavior towards them makes it hard for them to know when they'll receive love or when they'll be neglected as an adult insecure resistant can be seen in being overly needy of affection from a partner often being anxious about your romantic partner leaving you and becoming overly distraught when a relationship ends in dangerous research seventy percent of the children were securely attached 15 were insecure avoidant and 15 were insecure resistant foreign situation is that it's a controlled observation having control of the variables enables a researcher to standardize the procedure this means that each part of the studies kept the same you can see this in the same eight episodes that are used in The Strain situation each lasting for three minutes and how they use the same behavioral categories to assess the child's Behavior having this level of standardization allows for the replication of the research this allows you to compare touchment between different cultures something which has been successfully done with the strain situation as we will see in our next video on cultural variations in attachment another strength of the strange situation relates to its reliability one of the problems that can sometimes arise with observational research is the issue of Observer Bias this is because when a researcher is observing a person's behavior in this case a child in the strange situation it requires them to reliably record what they see sometimes the Observer might not be reliable or we could say not consistent in their observations maybe because they see what they want to see in the child's Behavior or because the behavioral categories are just unclear so how can psychologists check the consistency of an observer they can do this by assessing inter-observer reliability now bear with me briefly here's a quick side note inter-observing reliability is where you have two observers who observe the same event in this case The Strain situation using the same behavioral categories but they do it separately you then compare their ratings in this case what type of attachment behaviors did the child show how similar are the two observers in order to be considered reliable you need a strong positive correlation between the two observers a correlation coefficient of at least 0.8 now let's apply this back to aim to a strange situation when this method was checked for reliability in researchers trained in the Stream own situation beckettel in 2012 found a correlation coefficient of 0.94 in other words the strange situation is a method of assessing the quality of attachment has very high reliability however there is a downside to The Strain situation being a controlled observation this is because the child's behavior is being observed in a highly controlled unfamiliar room and saw their behaviors may not represent the attachment type they display when the infant is at home they may act differently this means that the study might not generalize to other situations and as such it could be argued that the strain situation lacks ecological validity another problem that has arisen with the strain situation relates to the number of attachment types this is because the original classification system only included three attachment types when this may be incomplete researchers found that some infants do not show clear attachment behaviors that fit into the three types as a result a fourth attachment type called disorganized has been proposed some researchers suggested that this may be because the parents have behaved in ways that has led the child to be both frightened and comforted by their parents which is confusing for them their only source of safety has become a source of fear finally one of the main criticisms of the strange situation relates to cultural issues this is because the strain situation was a way of measuring attachment designed in America that had a sample of 100 American infants this raises questions about how well it applies to other cultures and whether it is culturally relative culturally relative simply means that one method of measuring attachment is only appropriate to be used in the culture it was created for example children in Germany are encouraged to be more independent which is going to increase their number of insecure avoidant attachments whereas in Japan children are rarely separated from their mother and so using this train situation in that culture is going to lead to them having higher than normal insecure resistant attachments as a result it could be argued that the strange situation is limited to a specific part of westernized culture and that changes are needed if it is to effectively measure attachment in other cultures in fact now that you understand the strain situation the next part of the attachment course is all about cultural variations and attachment to watch that video click on the screen now I hope you found this video helpful and we'll see you in the next one