101exercise of personal choice in determining significant family members
seems to be conditional upon the level of commitment in relationships,
which explains why some friends are considered as family and provide
support as such, whereas some relatives are not. But the opposite is also
true. Some relatives, for instance siblings, can be felt as persons to confide
in and considered as friends. In this sense, we can have kin and non-
kinship ties playing both friend-like and family-like functions. The main
challenge lies in understanding the factors which are essential to building
up a certain level of commitment and family meaning. However, as some
authors have pointed out, despite the increased blurring of boundaries,
the two domains are not totally overlapping. Both are important in per-
sonal relationships and have their own place. Kinship ties are deeply
rooted in Western societies through blood and alliance principles (Allan
2008 ; Déchaux 2009 ; Godelier 2010 ), therefore the development of per-
sonal and family relationships is still strongly shaped by them.
In summary, significant family ties are being examined in the context
of wider processes of closeness and commitment and conceptualized as
embedded in complex interdependencies which go beyond the central
family dyads and the traditional components of Western kinship systems.
However, the extent to which family and personal networks overlap and
how this may vary across different contexts is still to be examined. Based
on findings from the three national surveys, this chapter will seek to iden-
tify who is perceived as family in personal networks and to tap the mech-
anisms that build up and shape family meaning and family network
patterns.
Drawing on a configurational approach to family, our main hypothesis
is that we will find a plurality of understandings of who is considered as
family within the networks of personal relationships. In the context of
growing pluralization and individualization, where individual choice and
autonomy is ever more important and family forms and relationships
more fluid and varied, we can expect meanings to go beyond the nuclear
co-resident family and reveal plural subjectivities (Beck-Gernsheim 1998 ;
Bengtson 2001 ; Roseneil and Budgeon 2004 ; Widmer 2010 ). Plurality is
also likely to be influenced by biographical or structural factors such as
gender and life-cycle (Schulman 1975 ; Wall and Gouveia 2014 ).
However, given the fairly strong ideological commitment to marriage
Changing Meanings of Family in Personal Relationships...