Abstract
Empirical data are necessary to evaluate the importance of understanding the connection between social networks and the life course. This chapter presents important new data from the first wave of the UCNets project (a longitudinal study of personal networks, life events, and health in the greater San Francisco Bay Area) to examine the role that close kin play in people’s personal networks. The chapter asks: (1) Who has parents or adult children available and accessible to help them? (2) Given that such immediate family are available, who reports an active connection to parents or adult children? (3) For people who have an active connection to parents or adult children, what role do these kin play in their network? And (4) to what extent is their connection related to other characteristics of their relationships? The authors use an egocentric network methodology to provide an unusually rich exploration of the role played by close kin, not presuming their importance, but instead locating them within people’s larger spheres of activity and personal networks.
The research reported here is supported by National Institute of Aging Grant R01 AG041955-01 (Claude S. Fischer, PI). We thank the editors of this volume and other members of the UCNets Project for helpful comments.
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- 1.
We wish to thank Eric Giannella for his help with recruiting respondents through social media.
- 2.
Because our main interest in the present study is in the relationships people have with their parents and adult children who do not live with them, we excluded cases where respondents indicated that their mother or father lived with them. In future research we plan to examine the effect of co-residence on the parent-adult child relationship.
- 3.
UCNets originally included two separate questions for confide and advise. Because conceptually both of these items refer to the domain of emotional support we treat them in this study as one type of connection. Preliminary analyses revealed much overlap in the names elicited by these two questions.
- 4.
We do not know the exact age of the person named. Respondents were only asked if the person they mentioned was of the same age or older than they were. Thus we cannot know for sure that the children mentioned here were all adults. Nevertheless, the likelihood that respondents will have children below age 18 who do not live with them is expected to be small and therefore not likely to introduce much bias in the results.
- 5.
With these aggregated-level data it was not possible to know whether the adult children who lived close to the respondent were the ones who were actually included in the network.
- 6.
We also examined whether family composition was associated with the likelihood of living near parents and adult children and with naming them in the network. One could plausibly argue, for example, that a widowed mother would be more likely than a mother whose partner is alive to live near one of her adult children, or that an aging parent would be less likely to name her adult children in the network if she has living siblings. We tested for these possibilities by including the existence of other kin (e.g., spouses and siblings) in the model. None of these associations was found significant, nor did they alter the results reported in Tables 6.3 and 6.4.
- 7.
There may have been, of course, other, unnamed adult children who got no support. Our network measure does not account for this possibility.
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Offer, S., Fischer, C.S. (2018). Calling on Kin: The Place of Parents and Adult Children in Egocentric Networks. In: Alwin, D., Felmlee, D., Kreager, D. (eds) Social Networks and the Life Course. Frontiers in Sociology and Social Research, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71544-5_6
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