ABSTRACT
Every aspect of human life, be it money, education, housing, or consumption, is wrapped in social relations, outside of which they do not have much significance. Change in social relations, particularly in the family institution, has aroused great interest during the whole history of Western social sciences. Changes are taking place not only in the field of institutions but also in the importance of social relations to an individual. The all-pervasiveness of social relations creates great methodological problems for attempts to measure them by use of structured questionnaires. According to the Scandinavian welfare survey of 1972, the quality of social relations in families was clearly worse in Finland than in Denmark, Norway, or Sweden. In the younger age-groups, interchange problems in the childhood home were a more significant predictor of dissatisfactory social relations than living in a single-parent family, the influence of which gradually diminished and was eventually very small.
