Social Norms

Abstract

As we have seen, only a minority of the population have actually given or received lifetime gifts so what do people more generally think about such gifts? In other words, what do they think about supporting adult family members, financially? And what does this tell us about the nature of family relationships today? This chapter looks, first of all, at whether or not there are ‘social norms’ around giving and receiving financial support to family members. Is there a general consensus on this? Here we, again, draw on both our quantitative and qualitative data and compare our findings with previous research in this field.