Internal Working Model:
Bowlby’s internal working model suggests that our first attachment(s) provide a schema for all other relationships that we’ll form in later life. The first acts as a template that determines our expectations and a measure against which later ones can be assessed. This concept is said to be ‘operable’ because it allows predictions to be made and importantly allows for those predictions to be tested.
Early attachments and adult relationships
Hazan and Shaver (1987): The Love Quiz’
Procedure:
The researchers asked people to volunteer to take part in the study. They analysed 620 replies. The questionnaires included questions about their current or most recent relationship, their general love experiences and their early relationships with parents in order to determine attachment type.
Results:
The was a strong relationship between childhood attachment type and adult attachment type.
Those with secure attachments as babies were in happy and trusting relationships and believed in long lasting love.
Whereas people with insecure avoidant attachments had a fear of intimacy and felt that they didn’t need love to be happy.
Those with insecure resistant were felt jealous and argumentative and would worry that their partners would abandon them.
Conclusion: Early attachments could affect later, romantic attachments.
Note: from a practical point of view, poor research like this is good when it comes to writing essays or discussing points in your exams. You can explain why the study offers support for Bowlby’s IWM but then criticise it for being correlational and various other issues such as use of self-reports.
You can take the quiz yourself if you like, just follow the link below:
Later parenting
Harlow found that his monkeys tended to suffer a range of long term social and emotional issues (see earlier notes). One of their deficits becoming poor parents themselves and even killing their own babies!
Bailey et al (2007)
It has also been found in humans that parenting style seems to be passed on to the next generation, probably as a part of the range of behaviours in the internal working model.
Bailey looked at finding out how consistent attachment quality was in three generations of families. This study looked at 99 mothers who had 1 year old babies. They measured their infant’s attachment style using the strange situation and assessed the mothers attachment style as children using interviews. They found that if mothers described poor attachments to their own parents in the interviews, they were also more likely to have children who were poorly attached in the observation. This association was also found in securely attached mother’s and babies.
They concluded early attachment style of the mother is passed on to their children and then subsequently to future generations raising the possibility that attachment styles and parenting skills run in families.
Myron-Wilson & Smith
Assessed the link between attachment type and involvement in bullying. The study used questionnaires in 196 children aged 7-11 in London. The results found securely attached children most likely had no involvement in bullying, insecure-avoidant children were most likely to be victims of bullying and insecure-resistant children were most likely to be the bullies.
Evaluation
Strengths:
- Research to support: There is a lot of research to support the idea of an Internal Working Model as stated above; Bailey (2007) Harlow, Bowlby, Hazan & Shaver. As there are a number of researchers who have found similar findings, this strengthens the credibility of the research. It also supports a deterministic view which can be useful in putting interventions in place. For example if we know that attachment style runs in generations, and there is a family who have been identified as insecurely attached. There could be some form of intervention or support put in place for that parent and child to ensure their attachment is more secure/positive.
- Reliability: Hazan & Shaver used a questionnaire which has high reliability. All participants were asked the same questions in the same order. This meant that the researchers could easily identify patterns and commonalities such as, linking the beliefs of their romantic relationships with their parental relationships.
Weaknesses:
- Alternate explanation: Kagan and the temperament hypothesis. This suggests that it is the child’s personality and characteristics that predict future relationships. This suggests that the IWM may not be in the only explanation, as this only focuses on the child’s experience of early relationship, and does not consider individual differences.
- Research to oppose: In terms of the theory of the IWM, there is mixed evidence. Research by Hazan and Shaver and Bailey provide support. However, research by Zimmerman (2000) assessed infant attachment type and adolescent attachment to parents. There was very little relationship between quality of infant and adolescent attachment. This is a problem because it is not what we would expect if internal working models were important in development. This theory could arguably be too deterministic as it doesn’t allow for individual differences, or the experiences of other relationships which may have more of an impact on how future relationships are formed.
- Generalisability/Individual differences: Hazan & Shaver (1987) used a self selected sampling method as they volunteered after reading an advert in the Rocky Mountain News. This is a poor way of selecting participants since you are not getting a cross section of the public. Using this sampling technique, for example, you are going to get people with extremes of experience or opinion. This means they may be limited in a range of individual differences. People who are shy, don’t tend to fill out personal questionnaires, therefore the findings would not fully represent them.
- Questionnaire/Interviews: People tend not to answer truthfully, particularly on issues of relationships, instead wanting to make themselves look good (social desirability)
- Validity: Retrospective: As we saw in memory our recollection of past events is not reliable, so it seems unlikely that people’s memory of their childhood experiences will be accurate
- Cause and effect: Hazan & Shaver (1987) have shown a relationship between early attachments and later attachments or behaviour are assuming that the childhood experience has caused the adult experience. However, other factors could be involved. Kagan (1984) suggested the temperament hypothesis. Children with a pleasant disposition are more likely to form warm relationships with parents and later in life, assuming they maintain their ‘niceness’, will form more loving relationships
- Validity: Much of the research in this area uses either the strange situation (to measure current attachment styles) or questionnaires and interviews (to assess attachment styles of parents when they were infants. When we looked at the strange situation we saw that the validity of the technique was questionable, some studies suggesting it was more valid than others. However, use of self-report techniques (questionnaires and interviews) is far less valid, especially when used to collect information retrospectively. People aren’t always honest in their reporting of childhood events and behaviour and even if they are, the fact that they are recalling information from many decades back makes this form of technique far less valid.
CGS Psychology Blog: Mrs Harris 