Attachment, Exploration, and Separation: Illustrated by the Behavior of One-Year-Olds in a Strange Situation
This is the paper that introduced the Strange Situation, the observational procedure Ainsworth devised to study the bond between a caregiver and a child aged roughly nine to thirty months. The design puts the child through a short sequence of separations from and reunions with the caregiver, with a stranger present for part of it, and the classification rests on what the child does at reunion rather than on how distressed they became while alone. From it came the patterns the field still uses: secure, and the two insecure patterns, avoidant and resistant. A fourth, disorganised, was added two decades later by other researchers for the children who fitted none of the three. The procedure did more than any other single method to turn attachment from a theory into something measurable, which is both why it dominates the literature and why the later work questioning how much it predicts matters so much. This page describes the procedure from public material, because no abstract of the 1970 paper exists.
This is the paper that introduced the Strange Situation, the observational procedure Ainsworth devised to study the bond between a caregiver and a child aged roughly nine to thirty months. The design puts the child through a short sequence of separations from and reunions with the caregiver, with a stranger present for part of it, and the classification rests on what the child does at reunion rather than on how distressed they became while alone. From it came the patterns the field still uses: secure, and the two insecure patterns, avoidant and resistant. A fourth, disorganised, was added two decades later by other researchers for the children who fitted none of the three. The procedure did more than any other single method to turn attachment from a theory into something measurable, which is both why it dominates the literature and why the later work questioning how much it predicts matters so much. This page describes the procedure from public material, because no abstract of the 1970 paper exists.
Written from the public account of the procedure this paper introduced.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Ainsworth, M. D. S., & Bell, S. M. (1970). 'Attachment, exploration, and separation: illustrated by the behavior of one-year-olds in a strange situation.' Child Development, 41(1), 49-67. N = 56, aged 49 to 51 weeks.
Where we use it
- What the Crib Actually Decides, Why We Care
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.2307/1127388
DOI: 10.2307/1127388