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Using a Catalogue of Parent-Child Attachment Studies to Describe the Distributions of the First 50,000 Strange Situations

Thu, March 21, 9:30 to 11:00am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 340

Integrative Statement

Since its invention in the 1970s by Mary Ainsworth and colleagues the paradigm known as the Strange Situation (SSP) has strongly contributed to current understanding of individual differences in parent-child attachment and development. In 1988, Van IJzendoorn and Kroonenberg published a systematic analysis of the largest database of SSPs at that time, which was 32 studies on 2000 parent-child dyads. They found that 65% of infants were in secure relationships with their parents, 21% in avoidant, and 14% in resistant relationships. Since 1988, hundreds of additional studies worldwide have been published, and study populations have broadened beyond primarily low-risk, middle-class samples. The introduction of “disorganized” infant-parent attachment in 1990 also marked a methodological addition to the quantification of SSP distributions.
While secular trends have profoundly affected family life across societies, the SSP has been a mainstay of psychological research. Despite thousands of data points, no overall examination has been undertaken of trends in distribution and differences between populations. The primary objectives of the current study are to attain baseline distributions of attachment categories across community and risk populations, and to examine shifts in the distribution of attachment classifications over time. The second objective is to demonstrate how maintaining a catalogue of all SSP studies currently available helps to identify opportunities for synthesizing and reanalyzing the accumulated evidence.
Several databases were searched using the keywords “strange situation” which yielded over 9,000 abstracts that were individually reviewed to make a determination of inclusion criteria. Approximately 300 studies met inclusion criteria. In addition to noting SSP distributions, a comprehensive cataloguing of all SSP studies was undertaken, including fully coded sample and study-level information for any study with a measure of child attachment. This catalogue serves the dual purpose of supporting future Individual Participants Data (IPD) endeavors for the CATS collaboration and will also be made available to attachment researchers at large to support small and large meta-analytic projects. Because every study’s sample and attachment details are coded, access to this catalogue will expedite all meta-analytic syntheses in this area of research.
The combined distribution across all samples was 13% avoidant, 55% secure, 10% resistant, and 22% for disorganized attachment. Differences were observed in the distribution of normative community-based versus risk samples in secure (60.6% vs 52.7%), avoidant (10.1% vs 14.3%), resistant (11.1% vs 9.3%), and disorganized (17.9% vs 26.1%) attachment. The year that the SSP was collected did not emerge as a moderator of these distribution patterns. Additional analyses will include an examination of deviations from population means based on child and parent gender, clinical status, and geographical location through multinomial tests and analyses of correspondence. The implications of these findings for research and practice will be discussed and the accessibility and use of the catalogue of attachment studies will be illustrated.

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