Explain What the Strange Situation Test Is,what It Measures,how It

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--What is it and what does it measure? Mary Ainsworth and her colleagues developed the Strange Situation that psychologists settled on a systematic way of quantifying infants' attachment styles.The Strange Situation is a laboratory procedure for examining one-year-olds' reactions to separation from their mothers.Here's how it works.First,researchers place the infant in an unfamiliar room with his or her mother.The room is loaded with all kinds of interesting toys,and the mother gives the infant the chance to play with them.Then,a stranger enters.On two different occasions,the mother exits the room,leaving the infant alone with the stranger before reuniting with her infant.The Strange Situation takes advantage of infants' stranger anxiety,which,as we've learned,tends to peak at about one year.Today,most attachment researchers rely on the Strange Situation to measure infants' attachment styles
--Categorizations:
(1)Secure attachment (about 60 percent of North American infants).The infant reacts to mom's departure by becoming upset but greets her return with joy.In essence,the infant uses mom as a secure base: a rock-solid source of support to which to turn in times of trouble (Bowlby,1990).
(2)Insecure-avoidant attachment (about 15-20 percent of North American infants).The infant reacts to mom's departure with indifference and shows little reaction on her return.
(3)Insecure-anxious attachment (about 15-20 percent of North American infants).The infant reacts to mom's departure with panic.He then shows a mixed emotional reaction on her return,simultaneously reaching for her yet squirming to get away after she picks him up (for this reason,some psychologists refer to this style as "anxious-ambivalent").
(4)Disorganized attachment (about five to 10 percent of North American infants).This rarest of attachment styles wasn't included in the original classification but was added later by Mary Main and her colleagues (Main & Cassidy,1988).Children with this pattern react to mom's departure and return with an inconsistent and confused set of responses.They may appear dazed when reunited with her.
--Still,the Strange Situation has its shortcomings.Researchers must be careful to avoid mono-operation bias (Shadish,Cook,& Campbell,2002): the mistake of relying on only a single measure to draw conclusions.The Strange Situation is,after all,merely one indicator of attachment.To equate it with attachment,as some psychologists have done,is a serious error.Indeed,some researchers have begun to develop alternative indicators of attachment,such as interviews in adulthood designed to assess bonding to one's parents (Hesse,1999).The Strange Situation also isn't especially reliable.As we learned in Chapter 2,reliability refers to the consistency of a measuring instrument.If the Strange Situation were a highly reliable measure of attachment,babies who are securely attached at age 1 should tend to remain that way for a short time afterward,as should babies who are insecurely-avoidantly attached,and so on.Yet research shows that many infants switch their attachment classifications over brief time periods.In general,attachment styles remain consistent only when parents' living circumstances stay the same.If parents undergo a change in their job status,their children's attachment style often changes along with it (Bruer,1999;Thompson,1998).Moreover,almost 40 percent of children display a different attachment style with their mother than with their father (van Ijzendoorn & De Wolff,1997),suggesting that many children can't simply be pigeonholed into a single attachment classification.

Explain What the Strange Situation Test Is,what It Measures,how It

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