Love Test Findings Attachment Style

Hazan and Shaver (1987) analyzed data from 620 people who responded to a survey in the Rocky Mountain News (a newspaper in Denver, Colorado) and from a college student sample of 108 students. The table below contains the percent of people who selected each of the attachment style descriptions.

Attachment Style	Hazan & Shaver, 1987
	Newspaper Sample	College Sample	Love Test Sample
Secure	56%	56%	43%
Avoidant	25%	23%	35%
Anxious/Ambivalent	19%	20%	22%

It's interesting to note that in the Hazan and Shaver samples there were a larger proportion of people who chose the secure attachment style than in the Love Test Sample. A larger proportion of the Love Test sample chose the avoidant attachment style as compared to the Hazan and Shafer samples. However the Anxious/Ambivalent proportions are close to the same across the three samples.

What do these differences mean? I don't know. In order to be able to generalize the results from a sample to a population, one must first define the population and then select a random sample from that population. None of these three studies does that. Both the Newspaper sample and the love test are based on people who *chose* to respond to the surveys, so there is the possibility of self selection bias. People who choose to respond to the surveys could be different than those who didn't respond to the surveys. In the Love Test sample it's possible that people could take the test more than once and thusly bias the sample. Shaver, Hazan and Bradshaw describe the Hazan and Shaver (1987) College Sample as a ""Captive" university student group" so I suspect that it was a convenience sample of university students rather than a random sample of the population of university students.

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