In the thick of relationships?

Abstract

The study presents the structure and intensity of the relationships of the Hungarian population over 16 years of age through a descriptive analysis of four variables measuring the frequency of personal and distance contact with relatives and friends from the EU-SILC 2015 survey. Ac­cording to the data, the relationship structure is on average balanced, half of the relationships are related to relatives or friends, and the relative proportions of personal and long-distance relationships are similar. According to our results, in addition to age, the financial situation of the household has a significant correlation with the characteristics of the relationship structu­re. One of the lessons of multivariate regression models is that the effect of other background variables on the relationship structure intensifies in parallel with aging, leading to a deepening of relationship inequalities among the elderly. Another lesson of the models is that the inclu­sion of household characteristics (financial situation, number of household members, material transfer relationship with other households) has a significant effect on the mechanism of indi­vidual background variables, thus confirming that a deeper study of relationship intensity and relationship structure within the household is essential. At the end of our analysis, we compiled clusters based on the intensity of relationships, the direction of relationships, and the channel of contacting, with a relative majority of more than one-third of the respondents with extremely weak relationship embeddedness.