Strong and weak family ties revisited: reconsidering European family structures from a network perspective

Abstract

Family systems appear to be an important factor framing people's individual behavior. Thus far, family systems have been primarily addressed on a macro regional level with indirect measures. Revisiting Reher (1998) and the family ties criterion, the main question of this paper is to examine to what extent we perceive family structures differently in Europe by taking direct measures of the structures of people's broader social networks into consideration. Based on the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we derived two indicators of family regimes based on individual-level data regarding the density of ego social networks: contact frequency and geographic proximity among network members. We aggregated these data and mapped them on the NUTS 2 level regions for various locations in Europe. The results of our analyses exhibit that, based on these two network indicators, significant differences in family structures between European regions exist. These results confirm the classification of strong family Southern and comparatively weaker family Northern European regions to a large extent, though substantial regional differences in and between countries are also revealed. Our findings demonstrate that the classification of European regions largely depends on which indicator of network density we consider. This is particularly obvious in the Eastern European regions where the classification markedly differs according to the type of network indicator. Intriguingly, social networks in Central European regions can be characterized as rather loose, often even looser than the ‘traditional’ weak ties in Scandinavia. Family regimes can, therefore, be regarded as a construct of multiple dimensions of which one dimension may be classified as weak while the other can be strong at the same time.

Keywords::

• family systems
• social networks
• contact frequency
• geographic proximity
• strong and weak ties
• Europe

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

The study was supported by a VIDI Innovational Research Grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) to dr. H. Bras, for the research project, entitled ‘The Power of the Family: Family Influences on Long-Term Fertility Decline in Europe, 1850–2010’ (contract grant number 452-10-013).

The paper uses data from SHARELIFE release 1, as of 24 November 2010 or SHARE release 2.5.0, as of 24 May 24 2011. The SHARE data collection has been primarily funded by the European Commission through the fifth framework programme (project QLK6-CT-2001- 00,360 in the thematic programme Quality of Life), through the sixth framework programme (projects SHARE-I3, RII-CT- 2006-062,193, COMPARE, CIT5-CT-2005-028,857, and SHARELIFE, CIT4-CT-2006-028,812) and through the seventh framework programme (SHARE-PREP, 211,909 and SHARE-LEAP, 227,822). Additional funding from the U.S. National Institute on Aging (U01 AG09,740-13S2, P01 AG005,842, P01 AG08,291, P30 AG12,815, Y1-AG-4553-01 and OGHA 04-064, IAG BSR06-11, R21 AG025,169) as well as from various national sources is gratefully acknowledged (see www.share-project.org for a full list of funding institutions).'

We would like to thank Paul Rotering for his comments on this paper and its earlier versions.

Notes

^1. Till 5 August 2013, 667 publications (including books and articles) cited Reher's (1998) work; with 70 citations alone in 2012 (see http://scholar.google.com/scholar?ie = utf-8&q = link:http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2,807,972).

^2. Studying family relationships and the social support of the elderly in the US, Lee (1985), for example, demonstrated that strong family bonds and help relationships between approximate kin existed and continued to do so in a country which was assumed to be represented by rather ‘isolated nuclear families’ (Lee, 1985, 34). Another example is the research conducted by Bernardi and Oppo (2008, p. 199–200) emphasizing the importance of, for example, aunts in Sardinian families as providers of assistance (as a source of financial support, caretaking of children, and networking to locate employment).

^3. Bernardi and Oppo (2008, p. 200) were able to demonstrate that the presence of maternal female kin alters women's fertility behavior by providing them with additional behavioral examples.

^4. Voluntary kin is described as non-kin perceived to be family but who are not consanguineous or united by law (Braithwaite et al., 2010, p. 390).

^5. ‘The specific boundaries of different family systems are often not crystal clear and there is much sub-regional difference. For example, in some respects Ireland does not fit well into northern European family patterns, there are indications that northern and southern France often walk divergent paths […]. This multiplicity of forms and behavior, however, does not negate the existence of more general regularities affecting large areas of Europe’ (Reher, 1998, p. 203).

^6. See: http://www.eth.mpg.de/kass/ (11.10.13).

^7. In Nanterre, a suburb located west of Paris, Segalen and Manceron (Segalen et al., 2010) interviewed the residents of a large building called ‘Le Liberté’. Additionally, interviews were conducted in Dole, a medium-sized town in eastern France and in Monhiolas and Atignac, two small villages in the Pyrenees.

^8. For an introduction to the SHARE survey see Börsch-Supan, Hank, and Jürges (2005).

^9. Ireland was excluded as there are no weights for Ireland in the data-set.

^10. For children relationships, frequency of social contact was aggregated in the survey for the first four children, while information on the spatial proximity between parents and their offspring was gathered for all children.

^11. In some countries, individuals were sampled randomly whereas in other countries household samples were drawn (Klevmarker, Swensson, & Hesselius, 2005: 32–33). In the case of Austria, a simple random sample was assumed (Klevmarker et al., 2005: 39–40).

^12. The modified nuclear family is characterized as a rather (socially and economically) autonomous family with weak kin influence and regular, but not daily, contact with kin who live in easy visiting distance (but not in close proximity) (Yorburg, 1975, p. 7).

^13. This family type can be characterized as a nuclear family unit with strong kin influence. Family units have independent resources, but goods and services are exchanged nearly daily while kin live in close proximity and have frequent social contact (Yorburg, 1975, p. 8).

^14. In this context, individuals from lower social classes tend to focus on their relationships with their immediate family members as they have difficulties maintaining relationships with wider kinship members based on reciprocal support (they cannot ‘afford’ to pay their extended kin back; Kwiecinska-Zdrenka, 2010, p. 381–383).

^15. In the impartible inheritance regions, traditionally, one child inherited the parents' property while the others were rarely compensated but had the right to live on their sibling's land. This practice, still known and combined with the succession of the farm and also lineage survival in the 1940s, led to relatively strong family bonds. In the regions of North Holland, all siblings had the right to inherit (in many cases, were compensated if one child inherited land), while property was passed on during the parents' lifetime during important family events (such as children's marriages). This inheritance practice resulted in weaker family bonds as children married comparatively early (Bras & Theo van Tilburg, 2007, p. 305).

^16. A result which has been confirmed by the recent KASS project (Heady et al., 2010) and other researchers (for example, Hank, 2007). Heady et al. (2010), for example, find the strongest degree of household complexity in Southern and Eastern European regions while they observed a decline in complexity following a north-south gradient (p. 45).