The strange situation is a procedure devised by Mary Ainsworth in the 1970s to observe attachment in children, that is relationships between a caregiver and child.
In this procedure of the Strange Situation, the child is observed playing for 21 minutes while caregivers and strangers enter and leave the room, recreating the flow of the familiar and unfamiliar presence in most children's lives.
[1][2] Ainsworth's narrative records showed that infants avoided the caregiver in the stressful Strange Situation Procedure when they had a history of experiencing rebuff of attachment behaviour.
[17] Crittenden also argues that some behaviour classified as Disorganized/disoriented can be regarded as more 'emergency' versions of the avoidant and/or ambivalent/resistant strategies, and function to maintain the protective availability of the caregiver to some degree.
[19] Main and Hesse[20] found that most of the mothers of these children had suffered major losses or other trauma shortly before or after the birth of the infant and had reacted by becoming severely depressed.
[21] In fact, 56% of mothers who had lost a parent by death before they completed high school subsequently had children with disorganized attachments.
[20] Subsequently studies, whilst emphasising the potential importance of unresolved loss, have qualified these findings.
[23] Michael Rutter describes the procedure in the following terms:[24] It is by no means free of limitations (see Lamb, Thompson, Gardener, Charnov & Estes, 1984).
This may be a major constraint when applying the procedure in cultures, such as that in Japan (see Miyake et al., 1985),[26] where infants are rarely separated from their mothers in ordinary circumstances.
Modified procedures based on the Strange Situation have been developed for older preschool children (see Belsky et al., 1994; Greenberg et al., 1990)[27][28] but it is much more dubious whether the same approach can be used in middle childhood.
Not only is this likely to provide boundary problems, but also it is not at all obvious that discrete categories best represent the concepts that are inherent in attachment security.
Of these two studies, the Japanese findings have sparked the most controversy as to the meaning of individual differences in attachment behavior as originally identified by Ainsworth et al. (1978).
[36] In addition to these findings supporting the global distributions of attachment classifications in Sapporo, Behrens et al. also discuss the Japanese concept of amae and its relevance to questions concerning whether the insecure-resistant (C) style of interaction may be engendered in Japanese infants as a result of the cultural practice of amae.
These have been used either individually or in conjunction with discrete attachment classifications in many published reports [see Richters et al., 1998;[37] Van IJzendoorn et al., 1990).
[38]] The original Richter’s et al. (1998) scale is strongly related to secure versus insecure classifications, correctly predicting about 90% of cases.
[38] Readers further interested in the categorical versus continuous nature of attachment classifications (and the debate surrounding this issue) should consult the paper by Fraley and Spieker [39] and the rejoinders in the same issue by many prominent attachment researchers including J. Cassidy, A. Sroufe, E. Waters & T. Beauchaine, and M. Cummings.