Contact Between Grandchildren and Their Grandparents in Early Adulthood

Abstract

Using cross-sectional data from the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (N = 1,231), this study examines the relationship between grandchildren and their grandparents across early adulthood. age is used as a proxy for change during the grandchild's life course and the influence of major life course characteristics is examined. Results indicate that the majority of young adult grandchildren have contact with their grandparents, but the average frequency is low. age differences in contact frequency suggest a decline in grandparent-grandchild contact across early adulthood. Multilevel analyses show that grandchildren's employment status, partner, and parenthood status do not affect contact frequency with grandparents. Rather, the results point at the importance of the parental home for facilitating grandparent-grandchild contact as age-related differences are accounted for by whether grandchildren left the parental home. Furthermore, most of the variance in grandparent-grandchild contact is attributable to differences between family of the mother's and family of the father's side.

Older family carers in rural areas: experiences from using caregiver support services based on Information and Communication Technology (ICT)

“…Contact frequency between grandparents and adult grandchildren is usually low, particularly when it comes to time-consuming face-toface visits. The relationship often evolves into occasionally meeting at family events, such as birthdays (Geurts et al 2009). Webcam contact with peer family carers provides a way of meeting people even when unable to physically leave the home or transportation is unavailable.…”

Children’s union status and contact with mothers: A cross-national study

“…The SHARE respondents were asked: “During the past twelve months, how often did you (or your husband/partner) have contact with [child’s name], either personally, by phone or mail?” The possible responses ranged from daily (1) to never (7). Given the unequal distance between response categories, the categorical variable was transformed into a linear variable representing the number of contacts per year (for a similar treatment see Geurts et al 2009). The transformation was conducted in the following manner: those who choose the options daily, weekly, about every two weeks, about once a month and never were assigned the corresponding number of contacts directly (e.g.…”

The Transformation of a Categorical Variable into a Continuous Variable: The Example of Church Attendance

“…Jedná se například o empirickou studii zjišťující četnosti kontaktů vnoučat s jejich prarodiči, ve které autor sleduje uskutečněnou četnost kontaktů během posledních 12 měsíců [Geurts, Poortman, Dykstra 2009]. Proměnná četnost kontaktů nabývá v této studii hodnot v intervalu 0 až 365, protože 12 měsíců tvoří jeden rok, který má standardně 365 dnů.…”