Abstract
Living kin, particularly partners and children, are a major resource of older people, but no official projections of such groups exist. I describe how a set of such projections in Britain up to 2050, including wider kin such as grandchildren, are made using a kinship micro-simulation model, an updated version of the SOCSIM model originally developed by Hammel, Watcher and Laslett. In modelling such kinship universes, particular attention is given to emerging trends such as extra-marital childbearing (which now accounts for over 40% of births in Britain) and cohabitation (which substantially increases the number of former living partners and leads to increasing complexity in kinship relationships, with more step-children, half sibs etc.). A second major impact on kin relations identified is that there will be an ageing of generational relationships as events are experienced increasingly occur later in life.
This paper was originally prepared for a conference in 2001. The simulations therefore show the effect of continuing the demographic trends observed around that time, they are not forecasts as such, but are used to indicate the sorts of patterns that would be expected if those trends of that period were to continue. Additional subsequent work using similar approaches may be found in Murphy (2003, 2004, 2006, and forthcoming).
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Notes
- 1.
Some micro simulation results concerned with the implications of low fertility in Italy for numbers of sibs and parents/children have recently been published (Tomassini and Wolf 2001), but they do not consider issues of partnership and the types of wider kin relations discussed here. However, even in Italy with its exceptionally low fertility, only about 20% will have no sib in years to come, rather higher than the figures for Britain.
- 2.
Note that this is not possible where a woman gives birth without an identified partner (in this analysis, any birth outside of a cohabiting or marital union), since such fathers are regarded as unknown by the program. Thus, data for certain types of kin presented here, such as the proportion with surviving parents, show the proportion with a known surviving parent (although alternative calculations excluding children with missing fathers have also been made).
- 3.
As noted in section on “Methods and data”, ‘missing’ fathers are treated as equivalent to ‘dead’ fathers in some cases. Therefore, these charts are confined to cases where both parents are identified (in any case, analysis of such cases would arise more naturally in discussion of lone parenthood than of parental survival).
- 4.
This paper is not concerned with coresidence, so ‘family’ refers to a kin group rather than to the statistically convenient, but socially deficient, definition of a family as a coresident nuclear unit. A situation where a couple splits up leaving the children with the mother, and she forms a new partnership, is different from one where the father does so, since the child will be in a very different relationship with the new partner in these two cases. I do not discuss coresidence here, in part because this has been considered in detail elsewhere (Murphy and Wang 1999).
- 5.
For example, if four parents, males A and B, and females C and D, have four children with parents AC, AC, BD, BD, the average number of sibs is one, but if the parents are AC, AD, BC, BD, the average is two.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the Economic and Social Research Council who funded this work as part of a project Evolving trends in British kin distributions and family life experience Ref. R000237076; to Professor Ken Wachter and his colleagues at Berkeley for access to and advice in using SOCSIM; to Dr Richard Smith and Jim Oeppen of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure for providing historical vital rates; to Dr Duolao Wang who worked on the project; and to the Office for National Statistics who collected the Kin Module data in the 1999 Omnibus Survey, funded by Economic and Social Research Council grants reference numbers R000237776 and R000237076 and to Dr Emily Grundy (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) and Olwen Rowlands (ONS) in preparing the questions used. The original collectors bear no responsibility for the analyses or interpretation presented here.
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Murphy, M. (2010). Family and Kinship Networks in the Context of Ageing Societies. In: Tuljapurkar, S., Ogawa, N., Gauthier, A. (eds) Ageing in Advanced Industrial States. International Studies in Population, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3553-0_11
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