Dartmouth Events

“Thicker than Blood: A Social Network Analysis of Family, Kinship, and their Racialization in the United States”

Existing research on family process, particularly in examinations of fictive kinship and chosen family, are highly racialized and classed. Using ego-centric network analysis of data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, we test the closeness, integration, and stability of biological and legal familial relations (biolegal) within the personal networks of older adults in the United States, examining whether greater shares of biolegal relationships are indeed linked to higher levels of closeness, integration, and stability in these networks and whether the answer to this question varies across racialized groups, as prior work on fictive kinship and chosen family might suggest. We find that while there is some suggestive evidence of the relatively higher levels of closeness and integration of the personal networks in which biolegal relations comprise a larger share, we find mixed and, in some cases, counter-evidence to existing understandings of race, socioeconomic status, and family and kinship.