Rudolph Schaffer & Peggy Emerson 1964

AIMS: Rudolph Schaffer & Peggy Emerson investigated the number of attachment relationships infants develop, with regard to John Bowlby’s emphasis on monotropy.

PROCEDURE (METHOD): In a longitudinal study they followed 60 infants from a mainly working-class area of Glasgow over a 2-year period, keeping a detailed record of their observations. The infants were observed very four weeks until they were 1 year old and then again at 18 months. At the start of the investigation the youngest participant was 5 weeks old and the oldest was 23 months old.

Attachment was measured in 2 ways:-

• Separation protest in 7 everyday situations

1. Left alone in a room
2. Left with other people
3. Left in their pram outside the house
4. Left in their pram outside the shops
5. Left in their cot at night
6. Put down after being held by an adult
7. Passed by while sitting on their cot or chair

• Stranger anxiety - every visit the researcher would approach the infant and note down at what point the infant started to whimper in anxiety

Data came from direct observation of the children or from the mothers keeping diaries as instructed by Schaffer & Emerson. The mothers also were interviewed about the child’s responses to separation.- eg: crying or fussing when left in its crib.

RESULTS (FINDINGS): Half the children showed their first specific attachment between 25 and 32 weeks (6-8 months). Fear of strangers began about a month later in all the children. The intensity of attachment usually peaked in the first month after attachment behaviour first appeared.

There were significant individual differences. Intensely attached infants had mothers who responded quickly to their demands and who engaged in the most interaction with the child.  More weakly attached infants tended to have mothers who failed to interact much.

At about 7 months 29% of the children had already formed several attachments simultaneously, with 10% having 5 attachment figures - eg: father, grandparent, older sibling.  By 10 months 50% had more than one attachment and by 18 months that figure was 87%. 31% had as many as 5 attachment figures.  Although at 18 months the mother was the commonly-selected attachment figure (65%), 75% of the infants studies had also attached to the father.

39% of the infants had a primary attachment with someone other than the person who usually fed, bathed and changed them.

Although the infants when young tended to protest more when mother left than when father left, by 18 months most children protested equally at the departure of either parent.

CONCLUSIONS: Babies do not normally develop monotropy and it is usual for a child to have several attachment figures. Other research supports this - eg: Michael Lamb (1977) noted how infants establish several attachments simultaneously.

EVALUATION (CRITICISMS):

• There are some queries around experimental validity. Mothers may not always have filled in their diaries as events occurred - being simply too busy at the time. Retrospective completion of the diaries may not be as accurate as would be desirable and it is even possible some mothers may have ‘manufactured’ events because they couldn’t remember or nothing of significance had happened but they felt they should enter something (demand characteristics).
• Schaffer & Emerson’s study can be argued to have higher ecological validity than laboratory observations such as the Strange Situation studies.
• Schaffer & Emerson’s findings are consistent with those of cross-cultural studies into child-rearing. Schaffer (1996) also notes that there is no evidence from societies where infant care is shared between members of the community that shared care is diluted care. Edward Tronick, Gilda Morelli & Steve Winn (1987) described the infant care arrangements of the Efe people of Zaire, where children are collectively cared for by members of the group, and where the average number of carers for a group of infants is 14.2. These collective arrangements seemed to have no damaging psychological effects on the children and brought many benefits, including the provision of various sources of security and wider social experience for the child. However, as Tronick, Morelli & P K Ivey (1992) commented, while the children were looked after and even breastfed by different women, they usually slept with their own mothers at night. By the age of 6 months, the infants still showed a preference for their own mothers.
• Elaborating on this study a little later,  Schaffer (1971) stated that it also showed ’cupboard love’ theories of attachment put things the wrong way round: babies don’t ‘live to eat but ‘eat to live’. He saw them as active seekers of stimulation, rather than passive recipients of nutrition.