Families, households, networks: Rethinking the relational structure of families through large-scale network data

Families are important sources of social support, yet this support is not available to everyone. Support availability partly depends on the relationships that bind family members together into a family structure. Researchers increasingly analyze such relational structure through a network rather than a household perspective. We identify two issues with this approach: an inattention to the importance of co-residence for support availability and an assumption that family networks do not overlap. We tackle these issues by conceptualizing families as a network of households interconnected at a population scale. Our approach efficiently captures both co-residence patterns and the intergenerational structure of families up to four degrees of separation from a central household. We illustrate the potential of our approach by constructing the ego-networks of 668,190 households with children ages 0-4 using register data from the Netherlands. Through descriptive analysis we reveal significant heterogeneity in family network characteristics, including size, density, relationship composition, and network overlap. Our approach provides a promising framework for studying family structures beyond traditional household and network perspectives.