Strange Situation Procedure And The Limitations

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In this assignment I will be evaluating the Strange Situation Procedure and how useful it is to our understanding of attachment. Mary Ainsworth (Ainsworth and Bell, 1970), developed the Strange Situation Procedure after she spent some time on her first initial studies on attachment. The procedure is ‘a way of assessing attachment security in a laboratory setting. It consists of a standardised set of episodes involving a child, their mother and a stranger in a sequence of separations and reunions.’ (Cited in Investigating Psychology, pg. 217). To evaluate this procedure I will look at the usefulness and the limitations that it concedes of. One aspect of this procedure that is useful to our understanding of attachment is that it gives a greater depth of knowledge for attachment than just observing in an uncontrolled environment, for instance a field experiment. The procedure is taken place is a controlled laboratory, where external variables can be controlled and more in depth observations can take place, therefore giving the researcher a greater set of results to analyse when it comes the reporting of the study. This first aspect helps us understand attachment because it gives the platform of basic knowledge that we need to start understanding attachment in more depth. It also initiates the probability of controlling but changing the situation/environment the participants will be in, therefore enabling us to see a variety of different behaviours to different situations. On the other hand, due to the fact that this experiment is controlled and partakes in a laboratory, where the situations are changed to expose different behaviours of the children participants, this can reduce the ecological validity within the study. Ecological va... ... middle of paper ... ... this lack of information there is clear difference with known experiences and how this effect a child’s behaviour and this should be reported prior to start of the experiment. In conclusion, the Strange Situation Procedure has many limitations on how useful it is to understand attachment, however has allowed us to understand attachment in more depth. Attachment behaviours are easily available to a researcher when conducting this procedure, therefore making this an efficient and convenient way to look at attachment behaviours. On the other hand, there is a lack of general and ecological validity within this procedure, which can cause unreliability of results that have been recorded and observed and can be difficult to apply to other people in other countries. Either way enabled researchers a way to quickly have an insight on a child’s behaviours towards attachment.

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