ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an analysis of differences among respondents in the strength of their obligations to kin. It explores differences among respondents in how strongly obligated they feel toward kin of different types. The averages of obligation ratings received by kin represent the central tendencies found within our sample of respondents; averaging stripped out the differences that exist among individual respondents. The standard deviations around the averages of each of the 74 kin types constitute the dependent variables in each of the multiple regression equations. Disagreements apparently do not vary with the generational position of kin, the coefficients for older and younger generations being insignificantly different from coefficients for contemporaries. The fact that obligations to kin are so well structured has another important implication for analysis, namely that the variation from respondent to respondent in acknowledged strength of kin obligations will neither be very great nor strongly patterned.
