Jenessa Halliday and Dr. Charles Nuckolls, Anthropology

This report evaluates attachment among twenty orphaned toddlers living in the Viengping Orphanage in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The report measures the attachment of the orphans towards their daily caregivers, using an adapted version of the Waters attachment q-set (AQS). Due to a correlation between orphans and insecure attachment, this report expected to find low levels of attachment between the children and their caregivers. Analysis of scores from the q-set test indicated that eleven of the twenty children experience insecure attachment.

Attachment theory holds that young children must develop a strong relationship with at least one caregiver in order to develop normally. Thus, attachment theory predicts that children with caring, responsive parents will grow into emotionally mature adults and enjoy healthy relationships throughout their lives; on the other hand, children raised by less caring parents will likely have problems forming healthy relationships. Thus, people form certain kinds of relationships based on the degree of love and support they receive in their early years. People thus have an attachment “style” which they carry throughout life. The different styles of attachment include secure (which indicates healthy relationships) and insecure (which indicates unhealthy relationships).

Attachment theory has special implications for orphans, who often struggle to form secure relationships with those around them, so this research aimed to confirm that orphans struggle to form secure attachment. Data examined attachment in twenty orphans, ages 1-3, and was gathered at the Viengping Orphanage in Chiang Mai, Thailand (see Figure 1), over two months.

For the study, attachment was measured using the q-set test of attachment developed by E. Waters. The Waters q-set classifies each child’s behavior and level of attachment towards his or her caretaker in ninety different categories through observation of child-caretaker interactions. The test gives children sorting scores between one and nine in different behavioral categories, according to Waters’ specifications.1 Each child’s scores for the categories are then compared to ideal values—using Pearson correlations and absolute differences—to determine each child’s leOrphans’ average q-set scores indicate that the children as a group would likely be classified as insecurely attached (see Figure 2). For the children as a whole, the average absolute difference from the ideal values in each category was 2.172, with an average Pearson’s correlation of 0.212.

However, analysis of scores from the Waters q-set test of attachment also indicates that nearly half of the orphans display secure attachment. While hopeful, this ratio still exceeds satisfatory ratios for insecure attachment, supporting the hypothesis that orphans struggle to form secure relationships and that orphanages do not truly care for orphans’ needs. Future analysis of the data hopes to provide a more in-depth examination of orphans’ behaviors and potential barriers to their attachment, in the hopes that an understanding of these barriers can lead to efforts to better orphans’ emotional and social health.
In addition to the BYU Office of Research and Creative Activities (ORCA) and Dr. Charles Nuckolls, this research is indebted to Emily Miller, the BYU Honor’s Program, Stony Brook University’s Attachment Lab, Dr. Ralph Brown, Alex Currit, the Viengping Children’s Home, Doungmanee Wonghaan, Jiraporn C. Yamamoto, Bradley Ferguson, and the kind caretakers I knew as “Pîi Ged” and “Pîi Oi.”

This research provided a wonderful opportunity for me, and I have tried to present my research in as many ways as possible. An article summarizing my research is being published in the 2011 edition of Chiasm (the BYU Undergraduate Neuroscience Journal) and I will also present my research at the 2011 BYU Honors Symposium and Western Regional Honors Conference.

SELECT REFERENCES

• Ainsworth, M. (1991). Attachments and other affectional bonds across the life cycle. In C. M. Parkes, J. Stevenson-Hyde, & P. Marris (Eds.), Attachment across the life cycle (pp. 33-51). London: Routeledge.
• Bretherton, Inge. (1991). The roots and growing points of attachment theory. In C. M. Parkes, J. Stevenson-Hyde, & P. Marris (Eds.), Attachment Across the Life Cycle (pp. 9-32). London: Routeledge.
• Waters, E. (1987). Attachment q-set (Version 3), 1-27. Retrieved from http://www.johnbowlby.comvel of attachment.