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Advantages
- Good external validity The study was carried out in the families' own homes and most of the observation (other than stranger anxiety) was actually done by parents during ordinary activities and reported to researchers later.So the behaviour of the babies was unlikely to be affected by the presence of observers. There is an excellent chance that participants behaved naturally while being observed, so it has good external validity.
- Longitudinal design A strength of the study was that it was carried out longitudinally. So the same children were followed up and observed regularly. This means it has good internal validity as there are no confounding variables that you would find if you studied different babies and compared them.
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Disadvantages
- Unreliable Data , this is because the results are based off of the mother’s reporst of their infants . Some mothers may be less sensitive to their infants protests and less likely to report them . This would create systematic bias and challenge validity of data
- Biased sample , The sample was of a working class population so the findings cannot be applied to other social groups , as it was also taken from 1960 , so Parental care has changed considerably since that time and more women go out to work and children are cared for outside the home , the number of fathers who choose to stay at home has quadrupled over the past 25 years ( Cohn.et al 2014). Today findings would be different .
- Cultural variations , in Individualist cultures such as the UK and USA , each society is concerned with their own needs or needs of immediate family , however in collectivists cultures are more focused on group rather than individual with people sharing childcare , so multiple attachments would be more common in collectivist cultures (Sagi et al 1994) compared attachments in infants raised in communal environments and family based homes found in closeness of attachment with mothers almost twice as common than in communal environment. So research only applies to individualist cultures
- Stage theories , this stage theory proposes there is a fixed order for development however in some situations and cultures multiple attachments may come first so it may be problematic if they become standard by which families are judged and lead them being classed as abnormal
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