Racial and Educational Differentiation in Extended Kinship Structures in the United States

Jonathan Daw, University of Colorado at Boulder
Ashton M. Verdery, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Although social differences in kin contact, co-residence, support, and exchange have attracted much demographic research, studies of kinship structures themselves have received substantially less attention. We describe the extended kin structures of the contemporary American population and how these differ by race and education. We employ nationally representative, intergenerational data on sibling and parental ties collected over 41 years to create extended kinship networks through social network methods. Results show that, adjusting for age and the opportunity for a tie in the data, there are no statistically significant differences by race in the presence of any type of kinship tie. However, statistically and substantively significant differences in the distribution of many tie types are observed by education. These results suggest that widely documented racial differences in frequencies and types of interaction with kin may be attributable to cultural or geographic differences in kinship processes rather than the kinship structure itself.