Anglo and Puerto Rican mother’s perceptions of attachment: Preliminary findings from the Island

This investigation used the procedure developed by Harwood (1992) with Anglo and migrant Puerto Rico mothers to examine cultural differences in indigenous concepts of desirable and undesirable attachment behavior among 27 middle-and lower-class Puerto Rico mothers living on the island. Of particular interest was: (a) whether similar cultural differences would be obtained using Puerto Rican mothers from the island as were obtained using migran mothers living on the mainland United States (Harwood, 1992; Harwood & Miller, 1991), and (b) to what extend extent these cross-cultura findings would be true of middle-class as well as of the lower-class Puerto Rican mothers living in Puerto Rico place more emphasis than do Anglo mothers on the child´s aility to maintain proper demeanor in a public context, and less emphasis on the maximization of self as an autonomous unit. Moreover, cultural groups membership was consistently the single largest predictor of significant variance in the regression analyses, suggesting the presence of core cultural values which obtain across socioeconomic status