Any individual is surrounded by a network of kin (parents and children, siblings, aunts, nieces, cousins,...). This network is shaped by the schedules of mortality and fertility in the population. The goal of this project was to develop and apply a formal demographic theory for kinship networks based on demographic information.
Kinship and family structures are critical and rapidly changing components of society. Relatives provide and receive services and support from each other; think of grandparents helping to care for grandchildren, or of inter-generational bequests, or of the need for families to care for their elderly parents, grandparents, and other relatives. These types of family structures have changed dramatically in recent history. Yet, until this project there have been only partial solutions to the problem of how kinship structures are determined.
The overall objectives of the project were (1) to develop the necessary theory for kinship dynamics, using new classes of population models, (2) to extend those models to include aspects of kinship not previously calculated, and (3) to apply the new models to data that permit comparisons among countries, historical periods, ethnic groups, and economic conditions.
Conclusions: The theory for kinship dynamics has been developed in a series of six (to date) major papers. The first developed the model for time-invariant, one-sex, deterministic, age-classified populations. This was then generalized to time-varying, two-sex, stochastic, and multistate-classifications, and to include both living and dead kin. The model has been applied to project kinship dynamics for all countries in the world, to compare kinship structures across racial groups, to explore changes during the demographic transition, and to project the kin available to help care for relatives suffering from dementia. An R package has been developed that implements the model. The model has been adopted by research groups in other institutions.
