Social Science and Human Research Bulletin

This study examined attachment styles and their influence on the quality of adult romantic relationships among adults in Ubungo District, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, addressing three objectives: identifying the attachment styles prevalent among adults in the district, examining how childhood caregiving experiences shaped these styles and examining how attachment styles influenced romantic relationship quality. A qualitative case study design was employed, using semistructured interviews and focus group discussion to collect data from 30 adult participants, 26 individually interviewed and 4 in a focus group discussion, selected through purposive sampling. Data were analysed thematically, with findings presented through verbatim participant quotations. The findings revealed three attachment-related response patterns: calm, contextualised patience; anxious protest and reassurance-seeking; and low reactivity or detachment, with a substantial share of participants displaying security earned over the course of a relationship rather than present from the outset. Childhood experiences linked to these patterns included the visibility of resolved parental conflict, an inherited belief that love is demonstrated primarily through material provision and a distinction between discontinuous-but-reliable and genuinely inconsistent caregiving. Relationship quality was shaped most strongly by whether communication-pacing differences between partners were made explicit, by a cultural norm of masculine emotional suppression and by a tendency to equate financial provision with love. The study concludes that attachment theory is meaningfully applicable in this Tanzanian setting, but that its expression is locally inflected by economic, gendered and communal dynamics, and recommends attachment-informed, culturally adapted approaches to counselling and relationship education in comparable urban settings. 

Attachment styles; Romantic relationships; Childhood caregiving; Tanzania; Ubungo District

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