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Die geografische Nähe bzw. Distanz zwischen Eltern und ihren erwachsenen Kindern ist eine wesentliche, wenn nicht die entscheidende Voraussetzung für Generationensolidarität. Doch warum wohnen manche Eltern und ihre Kinder näher zusammen als andere? Und warum gibt es in Europa länderspezifische Unterschiede? Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es, auf Basis der SHARE-Daten für 14 europäische Länder die Ursachen von geografischer Nähe bzw. Distanz näher zu durchleuchten. Neben individuellen Merkmalen auf Seiten der Eltern und Kinder sind es auch familiale Strukturen und kulturell-kontextuell bedingte Unterschiede zwischen den Ländern, die im Mittelpunkt des Interesses stehen. Die Befunde legen den Schluss nahe, dass es insbesondere alters- und familienzyklische Einflüsse sind, die einen Einfluss auf die Wohnentfernung zwischen den Generationen haben, aber auch sozioökonomische und herkunftsspezifische Zusammenhänge sind bedeutsam. Im Ländervergleich zeigt sich, dass die geografische Nähe bzw. Distanz variiert. Im Süden Europas wohnen Eltern und erwachsene Kinder sehr viel näher zusammen, was nicht nur der Koresidenz geschuldet ist. Die Unterschiede können dabei vor allem auf kulturelle sowie institutionelle Einflüsse und die damit verbundenen gesellschaftlichen Folgen zurückgeführt werden.

Family Configurations develops current scholarship on families and intimate lives by demonstrating that family relationships, far from being fluid and inconsequential, are more structured and committed than ever. By applying social network methods to uncover the relational patterns of contemporary families, this book draws on recent developments in family sociology, social network analysis and kinship studies to present a fascinating interdisciplinary approach to the family.

AbstractWith the permanence of strong emotional bonds between adults and their siblings and parents, with the rise of divorce, with the extension of remarriage, and with the development of pseudo‐kinship ties, complex family groupings have emerged. Orientational family members (Kuhn, 1964) are likely to be perceived as being included in relatively large and unbounded family contexts. To deal with the complexity of those contexts, one needs to develop an approach that makes it possible to analyze many relationships in a single model. Such an approach is presented in this article, which considers family contexts as cognitive networks (Marsden, 1990). To illustrate how statistical and graphical network methods can be applied empirically to those contexts, perceived relationships among orientational family members of 25 female students were analyzed in relation to balance theory (Heider, 1958).

This open access interdisciplinary book integrates the major findings and theoretical advances of a 12-year research program run by the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES research program hosted by the universities of Lausanne and Geneva, within a single comprehensive and coherent publication on vulnerability across adulthood. The book is based on the idea that vulnerability is an essential component of the life course that can inform how we use our resources, reserves and cope with stressors across the life course. It provides a unique interdisciplinary research framework based on the idea that vulnerability is a complex and dynamic process that can only be approached through a multidimensional, multilevel, and multidirectional perspective.This is an invaluable new resource for students and researchers in life course studies, and those from other disciplines willing to include life course factors in their research on vulnerability issues

This open access interdisciplinary book integrates the major findings and theoretical advances of a 12-year research program run by the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES research program hosted by the universities of Lausanne and Geneva, within a single comprehensive and coherent publication on vulnerability across adulthood. The book is based on the idea that vulnerability is an essential component of the life course that can inform how we use our resources, reserves and cope with stressors across the life course. It provides a unique interdisciplinary research framework based on the idea that vulnerability is a complex and dynamic process that can only be approached through a multidimensional, multilevel, and multidirectional perspective. This is an invaluable new resource for students and researchers in life course studies, and those from other disciplines willing to include life course factors in their research on vulnerability issues.

Same-sex registered partnership, marriage, and adoption open up the family as an institution to same-sex couples and, therefore, constitute a pathway to a broader definition of what is family. In the last 2 decades, a majority of Western countries have experienced an unprecedented institutional trend toward the provision of new rights to same-sex couples in the family. This swift process of institutional change has been, for the most part, accounted for in the literature by attitudinal changes expressing greater openness toward minorities, and a greater sensitivity to human rights (Engeli et al., 2012). By contrast, we propose an explanation featuring structural features of societies in the early 21st century. We hypothesize that a series of macrostructural conditions account for the precocity versus lateness of legislation favorable to the inclusion of same-sex couples into the family. Also, we expect that normative sex regimes opened to sexual activity between same-sex persons to have been favorable to such inclusion.

This research presents various narratives about family configurations of middle-class women living in Geneva (Switzerland). The results are drawn from qualitative interviews of 22 women and mothers of a child aged between 6 and 13, who were part of a larger sample of female respondents from both first-time and stepfamilies. The research features five styles of narratives, with distinct ways by which the consequences of individualisation for family commitments and family relationality were played out. All narratives stressed autonomy and claims to self-development by family relationships. However, the contents and functions of such claims vary to a considerable extent. Some stress the importance of the family for the security it provides to individuals, while others see family as subordinated to individuals' self-development and projects. Some emphasise the work of emotional care as central, whereas others consider the instrumental dimensions of family life more important. Some value equality between partners, and between parents and children, while others emphasise complementarity and specialisation between genders and generations as necessary. The styles of narratives are related to the life course experiences and resources of the respondents.

This article investigates the influence of personal networks on changes of occupational rates of men and women becoming parents. It discusses and measures the effects of various interconnected dimensions of network structures and compositions, such as density, degree of overlap between partners' networks, geographical distance between network members, and types of relations (family, friendship, or others). A set of longitudinal analyses on 235 couples becoming parents in Switzerland shows that for women, higher density in emotional support triggers a reduction in occupational rates once the first child is born, while for men, a higher density in practical support is associated with an increase of occupational rates, with a resulting increase of gender inequalities in the division of paid labour. Results are valid both for intended changes and for changes observed in the transition, and they hold when controlling for parents' educational level, income and personal values about gender equality.

In this article we extend the study of judged similarity among kinship terms from consanguineal to stepterms. Based on a sample of college students, we present a Euclidean representation of American kinship terms that shows that the distinction between consanguineal terms and step‐ terms is crucial. This representation matches predictions from the componential analysis paradigm and is shared by respondents of both genders with different ethnicities and first languages spoken. [American kinship, stepfamilies, correspondence analysis, consanguinity]