Intergenerational Relationships and Female Inheritance Expectations: Comparative Results From Eight Societies in Asia, Europe, and North America

Abstract

In the current article, the author (a) integrates two major theoretical approaches for the explanation of inheritance expectations, namely, the institutional approach of cultural anthropology and the interactionist approach of family research and social gerontology; (b) takes into account the institutional settings of kinship systems and inheritance regimes on the societal level; and (c) relates these institutional settings to the intergenerational relationships between parents and parents-in-law and their offspring. At the societal level, these relations are formulated as two hypotheses: The lineage hypothesis refers to the inheritance regime and its impact on individual inheritance expectations, whereas the welfare hypothesis refers to the relation between levels of affluence and quality of inheritance (instrumental or expressive inheritance).The empirical analysis is based on standardized interviews with women from India, China, Palestine, Turkey, Indonesia, Russia, Germany, and the United States (N = 5,282), which were collected for the Value of Children in Six Cultures research project. Descriptive results show strong cross-cultural differences in matrilineal, patrilineal, and bilineal inheritance expectations. In subsequent multivariate logistic regression analyses, the author tested societal, relational, and individual predictors on inheritance expectations. The results support the lineage and welfare hypotheses but provide no evidence for exchange-based assumptions on the effects of the quality of intergenerational relationships on inheritance expectations.