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The Swedish Kinship Universe - A demographic account of the number of children, parents, siblings, grandchildren, grandparents, aunts/uncles, nieces/nephews, and cousins using national population registers
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Abstract
We know surprisingly little about the demography of human kinship. In the current study, we give a demographic account of the kinship networks of individuals in 2018 in Sweden across sex and cohort. We used administrative register data of the entire Swedish population in order to provide the first kinship enumeration for a complete population based on empirical data. We created ego-focused kinship networks of children, parents, siblings, grandchildren, grandparents, aunts/uncles, nieces/nephews, and cousins. We show both the average number of kin of different types and the distribution of the number of kin as well as how dispersion has changed over time. We show trends for matrilineal and patrilineal kin and also show differences in the kinship structure arising from fertility with more than one childbearing partner, such as half siblings. The results demonstrate extensive variability as well as homogeneity in kinship structure. We discuss our findings in the context of other methods to estimate kinship.
... Hence, cross-sectional counts are inadequate (e.g. Kolk, Andersson, Pettersson, & Drefahl, 2021;Malmberg & Pettersson, 2007). ...
... Finally, our data differ from that of most previous approaches for calculating kinship, such as survey data estimates, microsimulations, and analytical methods. In fact, large-scale empirical demographic studies of extended kin are rare (see Kolk et al., 2021 for a review). Here, register data have critical advantages as such data contain information on nearly all individuals that make up the kinship network. ...
... Earlier childbirth across generations produces kinship networks with more individuals alive at the same time, while later childbearing decreases generational overlap (Kolk et al., 2021;Murphy, 2011). Later childbirth thus means that fewer people from the older generation will be alive as individuals age. ...
See : https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2023.2266403
Socioeconomic status influences demographic behavior. Moreover, socioeconomic status tends to correlate across generations. Consequently, kinship structures likely display social stratification. However, the processes of kinship stratification are intricate, and its prevalence and antecedents are rarely studied empirically. We have estimated socioeconomic differences in kinship in Sweden using administrative register data of the total Swedish population. We created kinship networks for the 1973 birth cohort and followed the growth and decline of kin from birth to age 45 of this birth cohort. We analyzed consanguineous kin, as well as spouses, reproductive partners, parents-in-law, and siblings-in-law. We calculated the difference in total kinship size across earnings and educational groups. We broke down the contributions of specific kin groups to this difference and also analyzed which demographic behaviors and generations contributed most to socioeconomic differences in kinship. Among men and women with low socioeconomic status (SES), higher fertility in earlier generations resulted in more kin than those with high SES. Among low SES men and siblings, lower fertility and union instability narrowed SES differences in the number of kin.
... A fairly large proportion of Swedes have siblingsaround 88% (Kolk et al. 2021). The average number of siblings born between 1940 and 2004 is around two, although the proportion of individuals with only one sibling increased starting in 1985 (Kolk et al. 2021). ...
... A fairly large proportion of Swedes have siblingsaround 88% (Kolk et al. 2021). The average number of siblings born between 1940 and 2004 is around two, although the proportion of individuals with only one sibling increased starting in 1985 (Kolk et al. 2021). Sweden is also a country known for a relatively weak tradition of intergenerational care and therefore has one of the lowest propensities of individuals living in close proximity to family (Hank 2007). ...
Background: Research on older adults' geographic proximity to their family has focused almost exclusively on intergenerational distances, while factors associated with intragenerational proximity have received little attention. Objective: We explore associations between (1) having at least one sibling nearby and characteristics of older adults (aged 65‒84), and (2) proximity to siblings and characteristics of dyads of siblings. Methods: Drawing on Swedish population register data from 2016, we use multi-level logistic regression models to investigate individual-, dyad-, and family-level determinants of close proximity to siblings. Results: Based on information about 987,486 individuals nested within 475,644 family groups, nearly 35Š of Swedish older adults have their closest sibling living within 10 km.The likelihood of living close to at least one sibling is higher for those with a parent nearby, without partners and children, the less-educated, and living in urban areas and/or their counties of birth. This likelihood decreases with age. At the family level, having more than one sibling, same-gender siblings, and only full siblings are associated with living near a sibling. Based on information about 814,506 dyads, the propensity of close intragenerational distance is higher for those with a parent nearby, without partners or children, brothers, full siblings, the less-educated, and those living in counties of birth and urban areas. Contribution: This study contributes to the knowledge about the geography of siblings - the family members that might emerge as more active players in older adults' family networks.
... Moreover, when empirical data of kinship network is available (e.g. consanguineous kin by sex and birth cohort (Kolk et al. 2021) and affinal kin by socioeconomic status (Andersson and Kolk 2022) in Sweden), future studies could benefit from further comparing results from formal kinship model and from microsimulations with empirical kinship networks. For environmental stochasticity, random matrix methods (Tuljapurkar 2013) can be incorporated into the kinship model we use. ...
Background: Kinship groups can have considerable importance (e.g., generational support, inheritance, and information for key life events). During demographic transitions, kinship networks are reshaped by changes in mortality and fertility rates.
Objective: This paper analyzes consanguineous and female kin and explores the effect on the size and structure of living kin before and after a demographic transition. We compute the kinship network of a female individual with average demographic traits (here called the Focal) at all ages but focus on only demographically dense ages (age 15 to 39).
Methods: The analysis uses a time-invariant model (Caswell 2019) to calculate the expected number of living kin using fertility and mortality rates. We use three examples (China, India, and Japan) with fertility and mortality from World Population Prospect 2019, based on empirical data.
Conclusions: We highlight two key results. First, at a demographically dense age of the Focal, the maximum expected number of living aunts, sisters, or daughters is approximately the net reproductive rate R0 (linear), while the number of living cousins is approximately R02 (quadratic). Second, such effects on kinship size depend on the magnitude of fertility change and on the age-pattern of changes in mortality. And the effects of fertility and mortality on the number of kin are not additive.
Contribution: This paper shows a simple relationship between demographic transition and kinship size, which makes it possible to estimate kinship size based on the net reproductive rate. The quadratic relationship between the number of certain kin (e.g., cousins, nieces) and the net reproductive rate is informative but not a priori obvious.
Generational overlap affects the care time demands on parents and grandparents worldwide. Here, we present the first global estimates of the experience of simultaneously having frail older parents and young children (“sandwichness”) or young grandchildren (“grandsandwichness”) for the 1970–2040 cohorts, using demographic methods and microsimulations. We find that sandwichness is more prevalent in the Global South—for example, almost twice as prevalent in sub‐Saharan Africa as it is in Europe for the 1970 cohort—but is expected to decline globally by one‐third between 1970 and 2040. The Global North might have reached a peak in the simultaneous care time demands from multiple generations but the duration of the grandsandwich state will increase by up to one year in Africa and Asia. This increasing generational overlap implies more care time demands over the entire adult life course, but also opens up an opportunity for the full potential of grandparenthood to materialize.
A recent literature studies the role of grandparents in status transmission. Results have been mixed, and theoretical contributions highlight biases that complicate the interpretation of these studies. We use newly harmonized income tax records on more than 700,000 Swedish lineages to establish four empirical facts. First, a model that includes both mothers and fathers and takes a multidimensional view of stratification reduces the residual three-generation association in our population to a trivial size. Second, data on fathers' cognitive ability show that even extensive controls for standard socioeconomic variables fail to remove omitted variable bias. Third, the common finding that grandparents compensate poor parental resources can be attributed to greater difficulty of observing parent status accurately at the lower end of the distribution. Fourth, the lower the data quality, and the less detailed the model, the greater is the size of the estimated grandparent coefficient. Future work on multigenerational mobility should pay less attention to the size and significance of this association, which depends heavily on arbitrary sample and specification characteristics, and go on to establish a set of more robust descriptive facts.
We use administrative data linked to parish records from Northern Sweden to study multigenerational inequality in education, occupations, and wealth from historical to contemporary times. Our data cover seven generations and allows us to follow ancestors of individuals living in Sweden around the new millennium back more than 200 years, covering the mid-18th century to the 21st century. In our sample of around 75,000 traceable descendants, we analyze (a) up to 5th cousin correlations and (b) dynastic correlations over seven generations based on aggregations of ancestors’ social class/status. With both approaches, we find that past generations structure life chances many generations later, even though mobility is very high. The persistence we find using cousin and dynastic correlations is much higher compared to a simple Markov model limited to sequential parent–child transfers, but we also find that direct ancestor associations are very small. This suggests that there is a weak but constant kinship influence that attenuates slowly over generations.
In this study, we provide demographic insight into the still relatively new family form of same-sex marriage. We focus on period trends in same-sex marriage formation and divorce during 1995–2012 in Sweden and the role of childbearing in same-sex unions. The period begins with the introduction of registered partnership for same-sex couples and also covers the introduction of formal same-sex marriage in 2009. We use register data for the complete population of Sweden to contrast patterns in male and female same-sex marriage formation and divorce. We show that female same-sex union formation increased rapidly over the period, while trends for male same-sex unions increased less. The introduction of same-sex marriage legislation in 2009 appears to have had little effect on the pace of formation of same-sex unions. In contrast, legal changes supporting parental rights in same-sex unions may have fueled the formation of female same-sex marriages as well as parenthood in such unions. Further, we show that divorce risks in the marital unions of two women are much higher than in other types of marriages. We find some convergence of divorce risks across union types at the end of our study period: male same-sex unions have the same divorce risk levels as opposite-sex marriages, and the elevated risks of divorce in female same-sex unions appear to have stabilized at somewhat lower levels than those observed in the late 1990s.
This article reviews the recent history of kinship research, noting the relative neglect of the topic in recent decades. The lack of scholarly and empirical work on kinship has been hampered by both the absence of survey and qualitative research on contemporary kinship practices. The author focuses on what is known and not known about how individual put into practice kinship in the standard, nuclear form of the family. There is surprising in attention to the ceremonial family and, little is know about how families draw boundaries and construct kinship on ritual occasions in the literature. The author concludes by suggesting research strategies for examining both how kinship is constructed and practiced in the United States and in other advanced economies.
How has the demography of grandparenthood changed over the last century? How have racial inequalities in grandparenthood changed, and how are they expected to change in the future? Massive improvements in mortality, increasing childlessness, and fertility postponement have profoundly altered the likelihood that people become grandparents as well as the timing and length of grandparenthood for those that do. The demography of grandparenthood is important to understand for those taking a multigenerational perspective of stratification and racial inequality because these processes define the onset and duration of intergenerational relationships in ways that constrain the forms and levels of intergenerational transfers that can occur within them. In this article, we discuss four measures of the demography of grandparenthood and use simulated data to estimate the broad contours of historical changes in the demography of grandparenthood in the United States for the 1880–1960 birth cohorts. Then we examine race and sex differences in grandparenthood in the past and present, which reveal declining inequality in the demography of grandparenthood and a projection of increasing group convergence in the coming decades.
Significance
Associations between genes and languages occur even with sustained migration among communities. By comparing phylogenies of genes and languages, we identify one source of this association. In traditional tribal societies, marriage customs channel language transmission. When women remain in their natal community and men disperse (matrilocality), children learn their mothers’ language, and language correlates with maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA. For the converse kinship practice (patrilocality), language instead correlates with paternally inherited Y chromosome. Kinship rules dictating postmarital residence can persist for many generations and determine population genetic structure at the community scale. The long-term association of languages with genetic clades created by kinship systems provides information about language transmission, and about the structure and persistence of social groups.
The `generational contract' is the most important and also the most contentious dimension of contemporary welfare systems. Much of the debate on how to reform it is still truncated, however, by focusing on its public dimension only, especially on pensions and health-care provisions. For a full account, the transfer of resources between adult generations in the family needs to be included as well. So far, research on family transfers has almost exclusively been limited to single-country studies. In this article, we present a comparative study of financial transfers and social support in ten Western European countries based on the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) conducted in 2004. Our results confirm, at the European level, the existence of a common transfer pattern. There is a net downward flow from the older to the younger generations, both by inter vivos financial transfers and by social support. Transfers from the elderly parents to their children are much more frequent and also usually much more intense than those in the opposite direction. The positive balance decreases with age but even those over the age of 70 clearly remain net givers. Our results also demonstrate that country-specific transfer patterns follow the typology of welfare regimes. Transfers from parents to children are less frequent but more intense in the Southern European countries than in the Nordic ones, with the Continental European countries being somewhere in between the two. This welfare regime effect still holds after controlling for the most relevant characteristics of the parents.
The author discusses problems involved in modeling the effects of demographic factors on historical kinship patterns with a focus on microsimulation models. "Since microsimulations of kinship ignore the correlations in demographic behavior within kin groups they ordinarily understate the variance of kinship distributions; for many kin types they also underestimate the expected number of kin." The author concludes that "those who design demographic models of kinship should be sensitive to the potential for systematic error." (EXCERPT)
Frequency of contacts with the family is an indicator of the strength of intergenerational exchange and potential support for older people. Although the availability of children clearly represents a constraint on potential family support, the extent of interaction with and support received from children depends on factors other than demographic availability alone. This study examined the effects of socio-economic and demographic variables on weekly contacts with children in Great Britain, Italy, Finland and The Netherlands using representative survey data which included information on availability of children and extent of contact. Our results confirm the higher level of parent adult-child contact in Italy than in northern European countries, but levels of contact in all the countries considered were high. Multivariate analysis showed that in most countries characteristics such as divorce were associated with a reduced probability of contact between fathers and children; in Finland this also influenced contact between mothers and children. Analyses are also included of possible future scenarios of contact with children that combine the observed effects of the explanatory variables with hypothetical changes in population distribution.
In an ageing society, families may have an important role in the caretaking and well-being of the elderly. Demographic changes
have an impact on the size and structure of families; one aspect is how intergenerational support is distributed when there
is a need for support to both older and younger generations at the same time. Another vital aspect of the provision of care
for the elderly is geographic proximity. This study is oriented towards the potential “both-end carers” i.e. persons who have
grandchildren in potential need of care while still having living ageing parents. The incidence of having grandchildren and
having living parents at age 55 and the proximity between generations is described using Swedish register data. The results
show that the share of 55-year-olds who are grandparents decreased dramatically from 70% to 35% between 1990 and 2005. As
expected, more 55-year-olds have living parents—a proportion that increased from 37% to 47% during this period. As a result
of delayed childbearing among the children of these cohorts, the likelihood of belonging to a four-generation family among
55-year-olds has not increased, despite increased longevity. Furthermore, most individuals live within daily reach of their
kin and no evidence was found of a trend of increasing geographic distances between generations.
KeywordsFour-generation families–Grandparenthood–Family care–Demographic change
The death of a child affects the well-being of parents and families worldwide, but little is known about the scale of this phenomenon. Using a novel methodology from formal demography applied to data from the 2019 Revision of the United Nations World Population Prospects, we provide the first global overview of parental bereavement, its magnitude, prevalence, and distribution over age for the 1950–2000 annual birth cohorts of women. We project that the global burden of parental bereavement will be 1.6 times lower for women born in 2000 than for women born in 1955. Accounting for compositional effects, we anticipate the largest improvements in regions of the Global South, where offspring mortality continues to be a common life event. This study quantifies an unprecedented shift in the timing of parental bereavement from reproductive to retirement ages. Women in the 1985 cohort and subsequent cohorts will be more likely to lose an adult child after age 65 than to lose a young child before age 50, reversing a long-standing global trend. “Child death” will increasingly come to mean the death of adult offspring. We project persisting regional inequalities in offspring mortality and in the availability of children in later life, a particular concern for parents dependent on support from their children after retirement. Nevertheless, our analyses suggest a progressive narrowing of the historical gap between the Global North and South in the near future. These developments have profound implications for demographic theory and highlight the need for policies to support bereaved older parents.
Cultural evolution
There is substantial variation in psychological attributes across cultures. Schulz et al. examined whether the spread of Catholicism in Europe generated much of this variation (see the Perspective by Gelfand). In particular, they focus on how the Church broke down extended kin-based institutions and encouraged a nuclear family structure. To do this, the authors developed measures of historical Church exposure and kin-based institutions across populations. These measures accounted for individual differences in 20 psychological outcomes collected in prior studies.
Science , this issue p. eaau5141 ; see also p. 686
This data brief gives an overview of the background, design, and content of the multi-actor OKiN survey (Ouders en Kinderen in Nederland; Parents and Children in The Netherlands). The purpose of OKiN is to examine the individual consequences of family complexity for intergenerational relations, intergenerational reproduction, and individual health and well-being. Another goal of OKiN is to generate detailed and nationally representative descriptive information on the types and degrees of family complexity that contemporary adult generations in The Netherlands (adults born between 1971 and 1991) have experienced when they were growing up. Unique features of the OKiN data are (i) the oversample of persons who grew up with separated and/or widowed parents, and persons who grew up with a step-parent; (ii) the double multi-actor design (i.e. primary respondents (anchors) report about multiple parent figures and parent figures (alters) report about multiple children); and (iii) the systematic probing of relations to and characteristics of all parent figures in the respondent's life. The brief provides the first descriptive findings about the OKiN respondents. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
Few studies have yet investigated how intergenerational solidarity between parents and adult children is associated with intragenerational relations between siblings. Theoretically, one might expect compensation between inter- and intragenerational relationship solidarity as well as spillover effects from parent-child solidarity to sibling solidarity. Using data from the German Family Panel (pairfam), this study analyzes 5410 interviews with young adults who provided detailed information on the relationships to their parents and up to four siblings. Focusing on four dimensions of relationships in families (contact, emotional closeness, intimacy, and conflict), hierarchical linear regression results provide general support for the assumption that inter- and intragenerational relations reinforce each other. We also find evidence for the existence of partially compensating relationships: more frequent intergenerational conflicts, for example, not only predict more frequent conflicts between siblings, but also greater intimacy. The results are in line with predictions derived from family systems theory as well as social learning and attachment theories.
This book analyzes the family and residential trajectories of men and women across the twentieth century, which are placed in a long-term generational perspective and in the historical context where they played out. It brings together a set of studies based on data from the Biographies et Entourage (Life Event Histories and Entourage) survey conducted by the Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques (INED) on a representative sample of nearly 3,000 residents of the Paris region born between 1930 and 1950. Inside, readers will discover an insightful analysis of the family that moves away from such traditional concepts as the household or main residence and proposes new ones like the entourage and the residential system. This innovative approach to the family network describes an affective and residential proximity that takes into account the relatives and close friends who have played or continue to play a role in an individual's life. The book first presents a detailed analysis of the Biographies et Entourage survey respondents' parental universe and proposes a practical approach to the notion of parenthood that reveals the family and non-family resources available to individuals. Next, it describes the evolution of the respondents' family networks, both in and beyond the household, and details how these family circles shape their subjective judgments during childhood, adolescence, and adult life. Coverage then goes on to examine the family ties of older adults, the role of grandparents and step-families, the importance of family spaces including often frequented places, and inter-generational family solidarity. Families extend well beyond the walls of the home. Interpersonal relations are constructed throughout the life course and in all the settings where they play out. This book takes this new family reality into account and traces its dynamics across time and space. It provides essential tools for researchers looking to conduct life event history surveys and to develop innovative areas of research in the social sciences.
Significance
Family members provide the majority of social support for most older adults, but not all individuals have living family. Those without living close kin report higher rates of loneliness and experience elevated risks of chronic diseases and nursing facility placement. How the population of older adults without living family, the kinless population, will change in the coming decades merits consideration. Historical racial differences and recent variation in demographic rates imply unequal burdens of kinlessness for white and black Americans. By projecting the US population using demographic microsimulation, we find increases in lacking kin similar in magnitude to projected increases in other important population health burdens such as diabetes and Alzheimer’s dementia. Increasing kinlessness may represent a growing population health concern.
Kinship networks are important but remain understudied in contemporary developed societies. Because hazards of vital events such as marriage, fertility, and mortality vary demographically, it is likely that average numbers of extended kin also vary meaningfully by education and race, but researchers have not addressed this topic. Existing research on kinship in developed societies focuses on group-level differences in multiplex kin networks such as those comprising household co-residence, instrumental and emotional support, and frequency of contact. By contrast, we provide the first population-based estimates of group-level differences in living kin in the contemporary United States. We estimate, by race, educational attainment, and age, average numbers of living parents, children, spouse/partner, full and half siblings, grandparents, grandchildren, aunt/uncles, nieces/nephews, and cousins, and test whether group differences in average kin counts are attributable to group differences in kin mortality and other processes.
Intergenerational family relations in China, Japan, and South Korea are changing. Multigenerational coresidence and dominance of patrilineal relations are declining. In some ways, the diffusion of so-called Western values and practices that are in conflict with Confucian ideals parallels the earlier process of the Confucianization of Japan and Korea. The demographic changes that are influencing families are new, however, and East Asians of the future will have fewer but longer-lasting kinship relations. At the same time, population aging and the expected declining role of the family in elder care are causing growing concern among policymakers.
Demographic microsimulation is an individual-based and computationally intensive tool used by population scientists to model demographic processes, to gain insights on life course transitions and to make projections. Several microsimulators have been developed, since the 1960s, to address questions for which standard techniques or data sets cannot provide answers. Examples of applications include historical studies of demographic constraints on household formation, the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on kinship resources for orphans and the elderly, and the study of interaction and feedback mechanisms in demographic behavior. From the methodological point of view, calibration of stochastic microsimulators is an area of active research.
'Lee and Mason have done scholars and practitioners a magnificent service by undertaking this comprehensive, compelling, and supremely innovative examination of the economic consequences of changes in population age structure. The book is a bona fide crystal ball. It will be a MUST READ for the next decade!'
The demographic transition is also a kinship transition. This insight is obvious for certain types of kin—as fertility falls, parents have fewer children, for instance—but its broader implications for communities remain unexplored. Prior work on this topic has focused on how the demographic transition reshapes the availability of living kin within a society over time to the neglect of how differences in the demographic transition lead to differences in kinship networks between communities. In this article, I examine survey data (for rural Thailand) and use microsimulation methods to test how different pathways through the demographic transition affect kinship networks in communities. My results show that different routes through the demographic transition can substantially alter kinship network size and, entirely through the mechanism of demographic change, have indirect effects on community integration. These effects persist long after the demographic transition has ended. I theorize reasons that community-level differentiation in kinship networks owing to the demographic transition are an important mechanism linking the demographic transition to modernity.
This life-course analysis of family development focuses on the social dynamics among family members. It features parent-child relationships in a larger context, by examining the help exchange between kin and nonkin and the intergenerational transmission of family characteristics.
The geography of kinship changes over the life course of an individual. This study makes a contribution to the demography and cultural geography of kinship by studying how migration and demographic patterns shape the geographical availability of kin in contemporary Sweden. This study examines how distance to siblings, parents and grandparents change over a person"s life course using longitudinal administrative register data. The study follows the complete 1970 cohort (N=74,406) and their kin from age 10 (in 1980) to age 37 (in 2007) using yearly information on residence of the index cohort and their family members. Overall, results show that young Swedes live close to their family members. The study reveals striking continuity in geographical distance to parents, siblings, and grandparents after age 25.
This paper discusses the use of genealogical data for the study of the historical development of kinship networks in the Netherlands, 1830-1990. There are two main problems in using genealogies: the year of death is missing for a sizeable part of the research population; and the information available on all relevant branches is far from complete. A mixed estimation procedure was used to impute the missing years of death. Overcoming the second problem is more difficult; the only solution was to exclude individuals without children from the analysis. If these and other limitations of genealogies are not ignored and the effects of various types of under-registration are carefully assessed, genealogies can provide valuable information for our understanding of historical kinship patterns. The empirical results, using data on more than 160,000 persons, show that demographic changes in Dutch society during the last 160 years have significantly affected the kinship configuration.
Available data strongly suggest that the household formation systems of all populations in preindustrial NW Europe shared common features that distinguished these populations from those in India, China, and many other preindustrial societies. Using censuses and similar data sources, this essay describes and contrasts household formation rules common to NW European simple household systems of the 17th and 18th centuries with those common to joint household systems. In NW Europe, late marriage was common for both sexes, and married people were almost always in charge of their own household (with the husband as head). Before marriage, young people often circulated between households as servants. In joint household systems both sexes married early and the young couple usually joined the husband' household. The paper devotes special attention to the way in which the splitting of joint households operated in different societies. Another section shows how a substantial proportion of young people in preindustrial NW Europe were servants at some stage. It is suggested that the institution of service may have been an essential part of the mechanism that adjusted fertility to prevailing economic conditions. -Author
Research focusing on families who are beyond the child-rearing years and have begun to launch their children is reviewed. These later-life families are characterized by continuity and change as they experience marriage, divorce, widowhood, remarriage, childlessness, grandparenthood, sibling relationships, and family caregiving. Challenges and suggestions for future research focusing on middle-aged and older persons' family relationships are presented.
This paper lists four interdependent family characteristics, and argues that they have been distinguishing features of the Western family for several centuries. They are: family membership, mother's age during childbearing, spouse age difference, and presence of other people. Their interrelationships and possible importance in personality formation are discussed. (Author)
The article addresses central questions in the research of family business, corporate governance and the transformation of Swedish industry. The analysis is drawn from the example of the Wallenberg family in Sweden, an industrial dynasty of five generations. Ideas of ownership and overriding values are discussed in relation to pressures of change in international industries. In detail, the article deals with 1) the concepts of corporate governance, long-term active ownership and networking capacity and the chronology of successful family capitalism, 2) the pressures for change experienced in early post-World War II Swedish industry in general and in the three multinational companies in particular, 3) how the owners and top management of the three companies responded strategically to these pressures and 4) the extent to which the provision of capital was accompanied by industrial competence or if simple patience on the part of capital was sufficient.
The extended family is a potential source of contacts and resources with implications for inequality and the formation of status groups. In this paper, we analyze the social and economic characteristics of extended families in the General Social Survey and the newly available Study of American Families, focusing on the diversity and reach of the kin network. We find that there is a strong status gradient: those with the highest education and occupational earnings tend to have the most diverse and far-reaching family networks. Network diversity and reach are found to improve financial security, even after controlling for individual characteristics. Our findings have implications for the capacity of the extended family to compensate for cutbacks in public transfer programs like social security and welfare. Those who are most vulnerable in terms of their individual characteristics tend to have families that are in a relatively poor position to provide support.
This paper reviews the current status of kinship research in the United States and identifies factors that might account for the declining interest in the subject among family researchers. The analysis uses both structural and cultural factors to illustrate how they can determine the diversity in kinship functioning that ranges from those family systems where kinship relationships flourish and those where they play a small part in family life. The structural and demographic variables determine the numbers and availability of kin, whereas the cultural variables determine the norms that establish the motivation to sustain kinship bonds. To illustrate how these factors operate among subgroups in the United States, I analyze three types of kinship systems: the lineal emphasis in White families of the very old; the collateral emphasis in the families of their Black counterparts; and the egocentric emphasis of White suburban families that are undergoing marital change.
