89and closer to Lithuania with regard to others. Personal networks in
Lithuania are small, restricted to kinship ties, and with a great salience of
co-residence both in the past and in the present. The importance of co-
residence in this country is not surprising as multigenerational arrange-
ments are still common in Lithuania and are also rooted in the communist
inheritance of collective housing. The presence of children is dominant
along with the partner, although in this country the latter tie is not as
central as in the other two, possibly due to very high levels of divorce and
migration. Moreover, friendship ties are almost absent from Lithuanian
networks. By contrast, in Switzerland, there is a high integration of
friends, but also of co-workers and ex-partners. Intimately related to this
heterogeneity and openness of network boundaries to non-kin, we wit-
ness a devaluation of co-residence as an inclusion criterion, as it is likely
that friends and co-workers have never lived in the same household as
ego. This means that proximity is built across several households and
relies on criteria other than co-residence history. Another distinctive fea-
ture is that networks are more partner-centred and sons and daughters are
less represented in personal networks in Switzerland, which may be
related to a low level of child-centredness values (as we will discuss below)
reinforced by the postponement of the timing of the transition to parent-
hood compared with the two other countries (see Chaps. 5 and 7 ). The
absence of grandchildren in the Swiss networks is indeed linked to calen-
dar issues and to the demographic reservoir, but it may also be due to
weaker bonds between grandparents and grandchildren, resulting from a
lower normative pressure on grandparents to take care of grandchildren.
Furthermore, the alliance principle is not a driver of relational proximity,
as in-laws are almost absent in Swiss networks.
Portuguese networks, despite the predominance of kinship bonds, are
moderately open to the integration of non-kin, especially friends, assum-
ing a middle position between the impermeability of Lithuanian net-
works and the openness of Swiss networks. On the one hand, Portugal
has the largest networks, which is in line with what is traditionally
depicted as a southern European profile. On the other hand, Portugal
stands out as the country with a more diversified pallet of kin and non-
kin ties and more gender-balanced in terms of the proportion of male
and female alters. This means that regardless of the salience of the ele-
A First Portrait of Personal Networks in a Comparative...