The extended family in transitions to adulthood: a dynamic approach

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to develop a dynamic understanding of the significance of the extended family in young people’s transitions to adulthood. Previous research has tended either to overlook the role of family altogether, to focus on parents, or to study different types of kinship bonds separately. Based on contextualized analysis of biographical interviews with three generations in 23 Norwegian families, the article suggests that similar dynamics of family support for young people may be valid across different types of relationships to extended family members (grandparents, step-parents, siblings, aunts and uncles). A multi-dimensional typology is presented, distinguishing four roles played by extended family in young people’s transitions to adulthood: inspirational, sharing, detached and distanced. Interview data are used to demonstrate how these can be acted out in different ways, and that shifting on the continuums between them depends on varying degrees of involvement and interaction. The aim of the article is to contribute, by way of thick descriptions and exploratory conceptual development, to a more dynamic understanding of the ways that members of the extended family can be important in transitions to adulthood.

KEYWORDS:

• Transitions
• youth
• family
• kinship
• extended family

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The concept of roles is widely used in life course family research, with which the current paper takes its theoretical point of reference due to lack of both research and theory development concerning the extended family within youth studies. Publications in this field frequently make use of the concept of ‘role’ or ‘roles’ with reference to grandparents, step-parents, siblings, aunts and uncles. Within wider debates in sociological theory the concept is often associated with structural-functionalist theory. However, in George Herbert Meads contributions to role theory, which long predate those of Talcott Parsons, roles are not fixed, but continually renegotiated in the processual development of the self. Likewise, Erving Goffman in his dramaturgical interactionist approach emphasized the ways in which roles may be performed in a variety of ways. In this article, the concept is used precisely to emphasize some of the ways in which given positions in kinship networks (being a grandparent, sibling, aunt, etc.) can give rise to a variety of types of relationships.