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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Fictive kin among oldest old African Americans in the San Francisco Bay area | | Author(s) | Colleen L Johnson |
| Journal title | The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, vol 54B, no 6, November 1999 |
| Pages | pp S368-375 |
| Keywords | Black people ; Octogenarians ; Family relationships ; Social contacts ; Social surveys ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | The purpose here is to identify those processes which account for the more active and supportive kinship networks among black oldest old than found among their white age peers. Focused interviews were conducted with 150 whites and 122 blacks aged 85 and over in San Francisco and Oakland, California. Both open-ended and semi-structured questions were asked, to determine how blacks defined family and kinship membership, their expectations for kin, and the desired levels of reciprocity. A content analysis of the responses indicated that blacks defined the boundaries of their families flexibly, so as to include fictive kin, and they upgraded more distant kin into the status of primary kin. They also emphasised the importance of collateral relatives so as to expand the size of the network. These processes use personal choices as well as intermediate needs to expand the basis of relatedness beyond blood and marriage. Thus the supportive capacities of networks increase in order to serve a potentially vulnerable population. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-000306234 A |
| Classmark | TKE: BBM: DS:SJ: TOA: 3F: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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