This supports bowlby’s theory that failure to form attachments has an irreversible effect on emotional development. This research however can be criticised because it lacks external validity. This is due to the fact that it was a longitudinal study, and during the 16 years there would have been participant drop off. This means that there would be less participants and therefore a smaller sample size, so it cannot be generalised. There is also the chance of social desirability as some people are likely to pretend they have a better relationship with their parents/children so they seem like better parents than they think they are.
In 1972, Ainsworth came up with the concept of the ‘strange situation’. She wanted to produce a method for assessing the quality of an attachment between an infant and their mother by placing the infant in a situation of mild stress to encourage the infant to seek comfort, and novelty to encourage them to explore (exploration behaviour). This tests separation anxiety and stranger anxiety as well as investigates the secure base concept which is when the mother provides the child with a secure base from which to explore the surrounding environment. About 100 middle-class American infants and their mothers took part in this study. Infants were observed with their mothers during a set of activities.
Throughout the set up, the infants were judged on an intensity scale of 1-7 (1 being the lowest and 7 the highest) which described their behaviour. This was Ainsworth’s quantitative data, though some of the method was qualitative. When the mother left the room and returned, with the effect of the stranger, the infants’ behaviour showed that the infants could fall into 3 types of behaviour. Type B is ‘secure attachment’; this is when the infants found it stressful and unsettling when their mother left the room. They did not care about the stranger attempting to give the comfort.
To collect their data Hodges and Tizard used various self-report measures, interviews, and assessment scales, with the participants themselves (adolescents) and their parents and teachers. The participants in the study were all aged 16 and had all been in institutional care until at least two years of age. At this age most of the children had either been adopted or restored to biological parents. The study focused on 31 ex-institutional children. A comparison group was also studied.
JWB Douglas did a longitudinal study of 5’362 children in 1964 which continued until they were 16. It was a large study so it was a good generalization but there were some faults within his study. The analysis was measured by IQ tests which aren’t perceived as accurate or reliable and people drop out due to death, illness and other matters. Nevertheless the study showed that working class children are less likely to stay at school and go onto higher
The 40 Developmental Assets were originally created in 1990, however research began a year prior in 1989. The Search Institute began a variety of studies on student’s grades 6th -12th. The original survey entitled “Search Institute Profiles of Student Life: Attitudes and Behaviors”, was given to both public and private school students in the United States. When the Search Institute released the first report titled “The Troubled Journey: A Portrait of 6th-12th Grade Youth” in 1990, there were only 30 Developmental Assets. But by 1996 based on studies, research, surveys, and focus groups of about 350,000 youth, a revision was made and in turn the report became 40 Developmental Assets.
It seemed reasonable to expect that the subjects' level of aggressiveness would be positively related to the readiness with which they imitated aggressive modes of behavior. Therefore, in order to increase the precision of treatment comparisons, subjects in the experimental and control groups were matched individually on the basis of ratings of their aggressive behavior in social interactions in the nursery school. The subjects were rated on four five-point rating scales by the experimenter and a nursery school teacher, both of whom were well acquainted with the children. These scales measured the extent to which subjects displayed physical aggression, verbal aggression, aggression toward inanimate objects, and aggressive inhibition. The latter scale, which dealt with the subjects' tendency to inhibit aggressive reactions in the face of high instigation, provided a measure of aggression anxiety.
Ainsworth et al devised an assessment technique called the strange situation in order to investigate how attachments might vary between children. She carried out an observational lab study and developed an experimental procedure to observe the variety of attachment forms exhibited between mothers and infants. Ainsworth’s ‘strange situation’ was conducted by observing the behaviour of the infant in a series of 3-minute episodes as follows 1.) Parent and infant alone in the room 2.) Stranger joins parent and infant 3.)
A weakness in Hodges and Tizard study is that the parents may not have invested the same time emotionally. The biological parent in Hodges and Tizard sample may not have been as interested in their children which are why they were less attached. Although the Czech twins suffered from privation this did demonstrate that a person without a bond could then go on a function adequately in society. Rutter’s study showed that recovery from extreme privation can be achieved given adequate care, although adoption, within the age of two, was still within Bowlby’s sensitive period. The longer the period of privation the harder to
Psychologists and Pediatricians have long recognized the effects of abandonment in children. Psychoanalysts that have an interest in children have taken notice to the emotional development of children who have been a subject of traumatic experiences, as well as the possible unhealthy role of the family environment. Abandonment is at the center of a number of asocial behaviors. Antisocial behaviors is an alarm for children who are distressed due to the cause of abandonment. These studies had also been done previously during the World War 2 era with the same results.