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little space for the circulation of new ideas and diversified sources of
information (Widmer 2016 ).
In summary, this chapter examines personal networks from a com-
parative perspective, by identifying the main differences and commonali-
ties between Portugal, Lithuania, and Switzerland. Two main research
issues guide our chapter. First, we aim to understand how social changes
in family and intimate life have been appropriated in three countries with
different historical, cultural, and political pathways, by capturing the dif-
ferences in terms of composition of personal networks and the priority of
certain underlying mechanisms of closeness. Secondly, this analysis
enables us to understand how the impact of these macro-social changes
are moderated by individuals’ life course adjustments, their structural
conditions, and the normative context.
Our analytical strategy will follow two steps. First, following a descrip-
tive strategy, we provide a characterization of the personal networks in
the three countries. For that purpose, we compare the salience of kinship
and friendship ties in personal networks, as well as the salience of present
and past co-resident members, the average duration of relationships, and
the male/female divide characterizing such networks. Second, in order to
understand the influence of multidimensional factors on the composi-
tion of personal networks, the impacts of national, structural (birth-
cohort, gender, and education), and normative factors (family-related
attitudes) are analysed using multivariate statistical procedures.
Research Methodology and Results
This section is divided into two steps. In the first step, we compare the
compositional characteristics of personal networks across the three coun-
tries by running a set of one-way ANOVAs. In the second step, through
a set of linear regression models, we identify the main predictors of the
salience of each compositional feature (for example, proportion of kin),
by considering not only the impact of the national contexts, but also the
role of cohort, gender, education, and family-related attitudes on the
salience of each characteristic. These factors will be introduced into the
linear regression models by blocks according to the different nature of the
R. Gouveia et al.