123Discussion and Conclusions
Individuals’ significant family ties in Portugal, Switzerland, and Lithuania
differ quite strongly in composition and size, but they all reveal the con-
tinued and overarching salience of kinship. Not surprisingly, close kin-
ship ties involving relatives from the family of orientation and procreation
are always more prominent than extended kinship ties, even if multigen-
erational and collateral ties, as well as ex-kin and non-kin, do play a role,
even if not a predominant one, in as-family networks. In sum, findings
seem to highlight the still fundamental generating principles of partner-
ship, biological filiation, co-residence, and support in building up family
bonds, in particular of conjugal and parent–child relationships. These
results confirm previous findings on family support networks in contem-
porary European societies, in which extended kin occupied a secondary
role (e.g. Coenen-Huther et al. 1994 ; Attias-Donfut 1995 ; Wall et al.
2001 ).
On the other hand, compared to individuals’ personal networks, non-
kin ties included in family networks decrease substantially and focus
almost exclusively on friendship rather than bridging out somewhat
more, as in personal networks, to include work relationships, acquain-
tances, or other non-kin. Interestingly, the Friendship-origin type of as-
family network, based on mixed networks involving both friends and
close kin such as parents or siblings, is mainly predicted by the life stage
(individuals belonging to the younger cohort), with no impact of
gender.
This first conclusion on the salience of close kin, however, does not
invalidate our main hypotheses regarding, on the one hand, a plurality of
understandings of who is considered as family within personal networks
and, on the other hand, diversification linked to different national con-
texts and structural variables.
On the issue of plural subjectivities, findings in all three countries
reveal a complex negotiation between the growing pluralization of fam-
ily meanings and the continued importance of the blood and alliance
principles of kinship, in particular those linked to the central dyads of
the nuclear family. Although partners and children are almost always
Changing Meanings of Family in Personal Relationships...