The Extended Family in a Working-Class Area of Hamilton

Abstract

Earlier writing in sociology held that kinship involvement would not be found in the urban environment. R. E. Park, for example, wrote in 1928: “It is in the cities that old clan and kinship groups are broken up and replaced by social organization based on rational interests and temperamental predilections.”² It was expected that the household unit —the nuclear family —would be the only kinship structure found in the cities; the social and geographic mobility of an organized society would make contact between related households impossible. Distances would become too great.

The term “the extended family” is used to refer to the pattern of visiting and mutual aid related households that has been found to exist in urban areas of the United States and Great Britain.