Family Culture of Intergenerational Transfers: Dynamics of Aging and Health

John Henretta, University of Florida
Beth Soldo, University of Pennsylvania

Families can be characterized along several dimensions, including: structural features, such as size, composition, or generational counts; the attributes and behaviors of individuals linked together in ascending and descending generations by blood or marriage; and, family-specific cultural features which refine generalized societal notions of kinship, kin roles, obligations, and expectations. Of these three dimensions, shared family characteristics, including the family's transfer culture and background, have been largely ignored. These shared family-specific features, however, may anchor notions of obligation, expectation, and responsibility that distinguish the transfer behaviors of one family from another. Layering notions of shared family traits onto more conventional measures of individual kin in the family matrix is likely to yield new insights into why similarly configured families differ in their kin exchange behaviors.