May 26, 2025 | News | Recommended Reading

Estimating Kinship Size of Older Adults in Europe With Models and Surveys

New study in kinship demography

In a paper recently published in Demography, Diego Alburez-Gutierrez (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR)) and his colleagues, Maike van Damme and Andres Castro Torres (Centro de Estudios Demográficos (CED)), compared survey data and kinship models in order to estimate the kin networks of older adults. They found that the two methods produced remarkably similar results, providing a solid foundation for continued work in kinship demography.

Country-level mean kinship sizes according to direct observation using SHARE data and modelbased estimates. © MPIDR

The paper finds that:

Across 22 European countries, survey data (SHARE) and demographic kinship models produce highly consistent estimates of older adults’ kin networks, with correlations of at least 0.7 for most kin types.
These results bolster the researchers' confidence in the ability of demographic models and survey data to capture kinship structures.
The largest discrepancies occur when the number of kin is very small, for example the number of parents of older individuals.

Original Publication

van Damme, M., Alburez-Gutierrez, D., Castro Torres, A.: Research Note: Estimating Kinship Size of Older Adults in Europe With Models and Surveys. Demography (2025). DOI: 10.1215/00703370-11961236