Project Details
Projekt
Kinship effects or affected kinship? – Investigating the functioning of family networks by their impact on adult mortality and fertility
Applicant
Dr. Kai Willführ
Subject Area
Empirical Social Research
Evolution, Anthropology
Evolution, Anthropology
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 462854750
Human life courses are embedded in family networks. Although family structures and support for relatives vary widely around the world, parents are commonly supported by family members in bringing up children. Similarly, productive and economic activities are also organized in family network contexts. The consequences of the primary social constitution of human beings have long been the subject of research in family and life course sociology as well as demography. With Life History Theory (LHT) and the Cooperative Breeding Hypothesis (CBH), evolutionary anthropology has two promising theoretical approaches on offer. LHT explains how individual life strategies are shaped by evolved response mechanisms. The experience of contingency and crises for life course and kinship relations is particularly relevant here. CBH explains reproductive cooperation and competition within the family through altruistic kinship support as well as through evolved self-interest of its members. Both theories are not only relevant for interdisciplinary family research, but also for the study of current demographic developments, since kinship relations have a decisive influence on both fertility and mortality.Using this interdisciplinary theoretical framework, it will be investigated how the composition of the family affects the individual life course, and in particular mortality and fertility. To that end, historical family reconstitutions from Europe and North America will be analyzed using advanced quantitative analysis methods. Historical data are especially suitable to investigate these relationships, as they allow to follow individuals over their entire life course for multiple generations. The focus is on cooperation and competition within families, especially with regard to the interaction between biological kinship, availability of relatives and socioeconomic context. Since social and economic contexts differ significantly within and between the study populations, it can be assessed to what extent kinship effects can be generalized or attributed to the structural context. Relationships between parents- and children-in-law are of particular interest, as they are expected to have a greater potential for conflict due to the lack of genetic kinship. The project employs a life course perspective, that takes into account the interplay of biological and social factors as well as individual experiences during one’s life. Thus, longitudinal analyses can be used to gain a more comprehensive understanding of cost-benefit balances of kinship relations. Overall, this project will explore the role of kin in the life course, using state-of-the art methodologies and established, detailed data-sources on individuals and their family networks, and pushing forward the field by working on a further integration of social and biological approaches to the role of kin in human lives.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
Canada, Netherlands, Sweden
