Uncovering the Kinship Matrix: A New Study of Solidarity and Transmission in European Families

Project Information

KINMATRIX

Grant agreement ID: 848861

DOI

10.3030/848861

Project closed

EC signature date 12 November 2019

Start date 1 April 2020

End date 31 March 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 487 427,00

EU contribution

€ 1 487 427,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT ZU KOLN
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - KINMATRIX (Uncovering the Kinship Matrix: A New Study of Solidarity and Transmission in European Families)

Reporting period: 2024-10-01 to 2025-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Families are essential sources of social cohesion and support, but they are also powerful channels for transmitting advantage and disadvantage across generations. While a great deal of research has focused on the nuclear family (parents, children, spouses/partners), more distant relatives have been largely overlooked. This leaves us with an incomplete picture of how broader kin networks – including grandparents, full and half siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and step-relatives – influence people’s daily lives, well-being, safety, and social mobility. Recognizing the family’s central role in Europe’s social fabric, the KINMATRIX project responds to the need for better data and new perspectives on “extended” kinship ties.

The project’s overarching aim has been to reorient thinking around two fundamental family processes:
• Solidarity: How do families mobilize to meet their members’ needs?
• Transmission: How do families pass along advantages and disadvantages within and across generations?

Our strategy has been to move beyond traditional, narrow views of family that often include only parents, spouses, and children. Instead, we sought to capture a richer “kinship matrix” reflecting vertical ties (e.g. parents, grandparents) and horizontal ties (e.g. siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, step-relatives). At the heart of this work is a new survey covering multiple European regions – Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western – as well as the United States to provide a comparative lens on diverse social and demographic contexts.

By the end of the project, we successfully created and released a groundbreaking dataset – the KINMATRIX survey – that captures extensive kinship networks at scale. Our research confirms that extended relatives are far more integral to people’s daily lives, emotional well-being, and social safety than traditional surveys would suggest. In doing so, the project has demonstrated that studying extended kin is not only feasible but crucial for understanding how solidarity and inequality take shape in modern societies. With the data now publicly available, researchers have begun using KINMATRIX to explore new questions about family dynamics, ranging from intergenerational support to cultural patterns of kinship. The project’s legacy is thus both methodological – proving the viability of large-scale surveys on kinship networks – and substantive, offering novel insights into how families function within and beyond their core.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Early phase: Preparation and survey development

• At the project’s outset, our priority was to plan and design a large-scale, web-based survey focused on collecting detailed information about respondents’ nuclear and extended kin. We began by reviewing existing research on family solidarity and social transmission, which underpinned the development of a tailor-made instrument called kincollector.
• Over the first year, we refined the kincollector interface to accommodate an unlimited range of relatives (e.g. cousins, step-siblings) without compromising survey length or data quality. We also established benchmark measures using data from established sources like pairfam, SOEP, ISSP, ESS, and GGP.


Mid phase: Fieldwork and data preparation

• In 2022, we launched extensive pretests with approximately 150 “anchor” respondents who each provided information on more than 2,000 family members combined. These trials helped us finalize the survey design and address technical challenges such as respondent burden and multi-actor recruitment.
• Despite notable challenges, primarily caused by the pandemic affecting fieldwork timelines and sample quotas, we rolled out the survey across Europe, collecting responses from over 12,000 anchor respondents (“egos”), who in turn identified more than 250,000 kin (“alters”). This breadth of coverage, capturing not just parents and children but also full and half-siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and step-relatives, is unique in contemporary family surveys.


Final phase: Validation, release, and analysis

• As promised in the Description of the Action (DoA), we publicly released the resulting KINMATRIX dataset in January 2025 via GESIS (ZA8825) alongside a complete documentation and metadata.
• Our team performed extensive validation studies, comparing KINMATRIX with official data, national registers, and probability-based surveys. The findings suggest that our non-probability survey design, combined with rigorous cleaning procedures, can produce data quality that satisfies the high standards of population sciences.
• Beyond releasing the dataset, we have published key findings on modern kinship structures (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2025) and on divorce and separation outcomes (Population and Development Review, 2023; The Journals of Gerontology, Series B, 2024). Several additional manuscripts have been published or are under review or in progress, emphasizing the dataset’s capacity to answer a broad range of family- and kinship-related questions.
• In terms of exploitation and dissemination, KINMATRIX has garnered interest among international scholars, policymakers, and data infrastructure initiatives, who are keen to replicate the KINMATRIX approach in new studies. Additionally, media outlets have highlighted the survey’s potential to transform our understanding of extended families in modern societies.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Progress and innovations

1. Data coverage: We have successfully collected and released unprecedented ego-centric data on family networks, surpassing traditional surveys limited to nuclear ties.
2. Empirical insights: By combining relational data (e.g. emotional closeness, frequency of contact, conflict, importance, support) with individual attributes (e.g. social position, education, employment status), we have opened new possibilities for explaining how broader family networks influence solidarity, support, and social inequality.
3. Methodological advances: Our non-probability quota-sampling approach to surveying large ego networks, implemented via kincollector, has demonstrated that web-based design and careful validation can produce data quality on par with established population surveys.


Results and conclusions

• Solidarity: We show that extended kin often play vital roles that rival or surpass those of immediate family members. Our comparative analyses highlight substantial differences across Europe, casting initial light on cultural and policy variations in how kinship networks operate.
• Transmission: Studies leveraging the KINMATRIX data indicate that extended kin may intensify both upward and downward mobility. Collateral relatives, such as aunts/uncles and cousins, may offer crucial resources, or inadvertently perpetuate disadvantage, across generations.
• Impact: The KINMATRIX project has contributed to the renewed interest in the sociology and demography of kinship. Its data and methods are currently being incorporated into follow-up initiatives (e.g. “KINMATRIX 2.0”) and have inspired other data collection efforts seeking to broaden the standard nuclear-family focus.

In short, major objectives set out in the DoA have not only been met but, in many respects, surpassed. By bringing extended kin into the foreground of family research, we have established a platform for ongoing interdisciplinary work that promises to reorient our understanding of how families matter in contemporary societies.

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