Maternal Sensitivity and Child Secure Base Use in Early Childhood: Studies in Different Cultural Contexts.

This study tested whether maternal sensitivity and child security are related during early childhood and whether such an association is found in different cultural and social contexts. Mother-child dyads (N = 237) from four different countries (Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and the United States) were observed in naturalistic settings when children were between 36 and 72 months of age. Maternal and child behavior during interactions at home and in the playground were described using Q methodology. Findings reveal that across cultures, concurrent maternal sensitivity and more specific behavioral domains of maternal care (e.g., contributions to harmonious interactions and secure base support) are important for children's attachment security during early childhood. Implications for the study of attachment relationships beyond infancy and in diverse contexts are highlighted.

Through Colombian lenses: ethnographic and conventional analyses of maternal care and their associations with secure base behavior.

According to attachment theory, the quality of care plays a key role in the organization of infants' secure base behavior across contexts and cultures. Yet information about attachment relationships in a variety of cultures is scarce, and questions remain as to whether Ainsworth's conceptualization of early care quality (sensitivity; M. D. S. Ainsworth, M. C. Blehar, E. Waters, & S. Wall, 1978) is appropriate for characterizing caregiving behavior in different groups and whether culturally specific descriptions of early care are related to conventional measures of maternal sensitivity and to infants' security. In this naturalistic study of mother-infant interactions in Colombia, scores on different domains of maternal care were obtained through ethnographic methodology, and conventional Q-sort scores for maternal and infant behavior were obtained. Findings are discussed in terms of the cross-cultural generality of the sensitivity construct and the sensitivity-security link and of the relevance of naturalistic open-ended studies in different contexts.