The Demographic Theory of Kinship

Abstract

This chapter will extract information on kinship numbers from the age-specific rates of birth and death of a population. A fixed set of age-specific rates implies the probability that a girl aged a has a living mother and great-grandmother, as well as her expected number of daughters, sisters, aunts, nieces, and cousins. Certain assumptions are required to draw the implications, some stronger than others. The formulas of this chapter in effect set up a genealogical table, giving not the names of incumbents in the several positions but the expected number of incumbents. Those of Fig. 10.1 are based on birth and death rates of the United States in 1965, whose net reproduction rate R 0 was 1.395 and e0o was 73.829, all for females. They offer a different kind of knowledge from what would be provided by a kinship census.