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Against the authors’ initial expectations, comparison of personal and
family networks, based on individuals’ perceptions of who is considered
as a family member in their personal configuration, did not reveal an
overlap between the two types of network nor a significant process of
suffusion or merging between kin and non-kin in family networks.
Compared to personal configurations, networks of individuals per-
ceived as family reveal two main trends in their composition: on the
one hand, an even stronger focus on close kin ties, in particular those
involving relatives from the family of procreation and orientation; on
the other hand, within non-kin ties perceived as family, an almost
exclusive focus on (a few) friends, thereby suggesting that friendship, in
particular long-lasting friendship, is more likely to generate family
meaning and bonds of affection and support than workplace ties or
other types of past or present connectedness such as vicinity or ex-kin.
In other words, despite some blurring of ties, there continue to be fairly
clear boundaries between kin and non-kin ties in the predominant
meanings of family.
In sum, increased relational flexibility in contemporary societies
goes along with constraints associated with life stages, biographical
factors, and social coordinates such as education and gender.
Individuals’ understandings of personal relationships may have become
more fluid and less tightly framed by normative conventions, but there
is no doubt that biographical, attitudinal, and social contexts continue
to strongly shape the dynamics and patterning of personal relation-
ships. Perhaps more importantly, these findings underline the need to
examine personal networks as they develop over time, as a process, in
the context of a complex negotiation between individuals’ lifestyle
preferences, biographical experiences, and major social structural con-
straints such as gender, generation, and social class. Personal networks
are not separate from social structures; on the contrary, they reveal the
persistence of highly stratified societies, in terms of class, gender, and
life stages.^1 They indeed contribute, in their own way, to this persis-
tence, by making interactions in the private realm align with the cur-
rent trends of western societies towards greater social closure and
inequalities.
K. Wall et al.