There is a vast amount of literature that considers the importance of the family as an institution. Little attention, however, has been given to the impact of the family structure and its dynamics on institutions. This limits our ability to understand distinct institutional developments—and hence growth—in the past and present. This paper supports this argument by highlighting the importance of...

Family background-kinship-can propagate careers. The evidence for academic nepotism is littered with complex associations and disputed causal inferences. Surname clustering, albeit with very careful consideration of surnames' flows across regions and time periods, can be used to reflect family ties. We examined surname patterns in the health science literature, by country, across five decades. ...

This review presents studies in various world regions. Each uses network analysis software designed explicitly for kinship studies with explicit network measures of cohesion. It presents evidence of fundamental differences in the forms of marital cohesion that show profoundly variable effects over a wide range of social phenomena, regional scales, and diverse cultures. Social cohesion is the ba...

PURPOSE This study explored factors that are related to the level of contact (number of visits and calls) between newly admitted nursing home residents and their family and friends. In addition to reexamining factors studied previously, several new factors were explored: contact level prior to nursing home placement, dementia status, and resident race. DESIGN AND METHODS Interviews were condu...

Although the relationship between job and life satisfaction has attracted much attention, little research has been undertaken in geographically remote settings. The present study addresses this deficiency by testing a causal model that incorporates job related, personal, environmental, and community related variables. The LISREL results based on a sample of 286 male employees from an open-cut c...

THE proband, an intelligent and rather talkative woman aged 63 years, was seen by one of us (A.A.D.) for blind certification. The fundus appearances were highly unusual. She stated that she was a member of a large kinship living in Dundee, many members of which were affected by a disease of the eyes similar to her own. Her knowledge of the family history was so accurate and extensive and her in...