Aging and Primary Relations

Abstract

After listing all consanguinal and affinal kin, our sample of 800 respondents forty-five and older identified those with whom they felt very close and who among these were confidants. A parallel procedure was used to identify very close friends and confidant friends. These four types (primary relatives, confidant relatives, primary friends, confidant friends) were seen as constituting the primary-group resource of our respondents. Thirty of the 800 individuals lacked primary ties with kin, compared to 118 of 800 without primary ties with friends. While very few of the respondents were without very close ties of any kind, those with extensive primary-group resources were more likely to be women rather than men, younger rather than older, married rather than single, and in high rather than low-status occupations.