Describe and Evaluate Stages of attachment identified by Shaffer and Emerson (16)

Shaffer and Emerson aimed to investigate the formation of early attachments, they used 60 babies from Glasgow working class families. They visited their homes every month for a year, then again at 18months and asked mothers questions about the babies stranger/separation anxiety. Based on their findings they proposed attachments develop in 4 stages. First, Asocial stage, this is the stage that baby is forming bonds but relationship with objects and humans are similar. Stage 2, Indiscriminate attachment, from 2-7 months where babies display more observable social behaviour. Preference for people over objects and prefer familiar adults, however do not show stranger or separation anxiety. Stage 3, Specific attachment, from around 7 months majority of babies display stranger anxiety and separation anxiety from one particular adult (biological mother in 65% of cases). Specific attachment with primary attachment figure, but this is not necessarily the person the child spent the most time with but who offers the most interaction and responds to baby's 'signals'. Stage 4, Multiple attachments, shortly after the babies start to show attachment to one adult usually extend to multiple attachments with other adults who regularly spend time with. In Shaffer & Emersons study 29% of children had secondary attachment within a month of primary attachment.A weakness of these stages of attachment are that they are culturally relative. Sagi found that infants raised in individualist cultures (first by the family) were twice as close to their mothers in comparison to those raised in collectivist cultures (by the community). These results suggest that attachments are culturally specific and the fact that Shaffer & Emersons study was only carried out in Individualist cultures creates an imposed epic to universally apply the stages of attachment formation to collectivist cultures. I particular the stages at which the infant forms multiple attachments, is likely to be much earlier on in a collectivist culture than individualist. Another weakness for the stages of attachment are that there are problems studying the Asocial stage. This is because it is during the first few weeks of life, although important interactions take place the, the problem is that babies that are young have poor co-ordination and are immobile. Therefore it is very difficult to make any judgements about them based on first observations of behaviour. Although it is likely the Childs feelings and emotions are highly social, evidence cannot be relied on.A final weakness is that there is also difficulty measuring multiple attachments. Just because a baby gets distressed when an individual leaves the room, does not necessarily mean that the individual is a 'true' attachment figure. Bowlby pointed out that children have playmates as well as attachment figures and may get distressed when a playmate leaves the room. This is a problem for Shaffer & Emersons stages of attachments because their observation of this stage does not distinguish between secondary attachment and playmates.