139Finally, family structures embedded in individual biographies matter. As we
have underlined before, individual projects and identities interact with
structures. Since two dyads seem to be key in Western societies, the parent-
child relationship and the couple relationship, we will take into account
experiences of parenthood and partnership, in addition to controlling for
having siblings. The impact of life trajectories on personal configurations
will be covered in greater depth in Chap. 7.
A Typology of Personal Configurations
Before going to the heart of our analysis we need to touch on the meth-
odological procedure we applied to create a meaningful typology of per-
sonal configurations. As a reminder, in Chap. 3 the detailed analysis of
ties cited by respondents reveals that specific ties are more salient in some
countries than in others. Thus, we expect to find a diversified palette of
configurations of ties. To account for the diversity of arrangements, we
created a typology of personal configurations, based on the ties presented
in Chap. 3.
We considered 16 categories which are conceptually insightful and
mentioned by more than 4% of respondents, plus a residual category:
partners, daughters, sons, mothers, fathers, sisters, female friends, broth-
ers, male friends, grandchildren, collaterals, colleagues, children-in-law,
siblings-in-law, parents-in-law, non-kin members, and other.^2 We applied
principal components analysis using Varimax rotation on the 17 categories
to extract the initial components. Following standard practice in factor
analysis (Tabachnick and Fidell 1996 ), we retained nine components that
accounted for 66% of the explained variance. The scores of the nine prin-
cipal components are inputted into a hierarchical clustering analysis
based on a measure of the Euclidean distance between individuals and on
the Ward clustering algorithm (Ward 1963 ). We retained a solution with
nine clusters, chosen because of its balance of interpretability and statisti-
cal efficiency (Everitt et al. 2011 ), plus an additional configuration gath-
ering the empty networks named Alone. The configuration Alone does not
result from the clustering procedure but was built a priori, as empty net-
works do not include ties.
Mapping the Plurality of Personal Configurations