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The twentieth century witnessed dramatic changes both in the population and in the family/kinship age-structure, which affected the prevalence, length, and form of relationships between grandparents and grandchildren. Although most European countries share similar trends, there are considerable national peculiarities which have an impact on the experience of grandchildhood.

Stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationships are increasingly common as a result of relatively high rates of divorce and remarriage and increased longevity. When relationships are close, stepgrandparents may be valuable resources for stepgrandchildren, but the relational processes salient to the development of these ties remain largely unknown. The purposes of our research were: (1) to explore the complexity of stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationships, and (2) to examine processes that affected stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationship development.

We present results from four grounded theory projects, which were based on semistructured interviews with 58 stepgrandchildren who provided data about 165 relationships with stepgrandparents. Collectively, these studies highlighted key processes of stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationship development operating within four distinct pathways to stepgrandparenthood – long-term, later life, skip-generation, and inherited pathways.

Stepgrandchildren’s closeness to stepgrandparents was influenced by factors such as timing (the child’s age and when in their life courses intergenerational relationships began), stepgrandparents’ roles in the life of the middle-generation parent and the quality of those relationships, whether or not the stepfamily defined the stepgrandparent as kin (e.g., through the use of claiming language), intergenerational contact frequency, and stepgrandparents’ affinity-building.

Our study furthers understanding of stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild by attending to the importance of context in examining the processes that affect intergenerational steprelationship development. Exploring processes related to intergenerational steprelationships strengthens our understanding of the benefits and challenges associated with steprelationship development. Our study also sheds light on the “new look at kinship” and the processes that inform the social construction of family in a changing familial landscape.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the needs and experiences of Chinese families where grandparents were involved in the non-custodial care of their grandchildren.

In total five grandparent focus groups and three parent focus groups were conducted. The data were analysed using the constant comparative method.

Though most grandparents enjoyed their grandparent roles, there were differences in the perception of the grandparent role between grandparents and parents. Both grandparents and parents reported intergenerational conflicts on the management of the grandchildren, which was distressing for both parties.

It was suggested that grandparent training programmes might be a viable strategy to support families.

The study provided insights into family dynamics in the context of grandparent caregiving, child development, as well as children's services.

For much of history, children have constituted nearly half of human populations. The twentieth century marked a tidal turn in population composition for many societies. By the beginning of the current century, a number of societies had only 15% children under age 15 and nearly twice as high a proportion of individuals aged 60 and over (UN, 2007). Japan tops the statistics, having 28% old people and 14% children. With Japan as the only exception, the twenty “oldest” populations, with median ages of 39–42, are all in Europe. In sharp contrast, some countries in Asia and Africa have less than 5% of their populations aged 60 and over. Twenty-seven of these countries have median ages under 18. The lowest figure is found in Uganda, where the median is 14.8. In 2007, the proportion of children in the overall population of Africa is 41%, while individuals aged 60 and over constitute 5.3% (UN, 2007).

This chapter argues the importance of ritualised family occasions in the moral economy of intergenerational families. The chapter draws on 34 semi-biographical interviews with 13 men and 21 women aged 20–90, focussing on stories about troubled or failed rituals. The analysis shows that family members depend on the support and recognition of each other to maintain their moral identities. Ritualised occasions work as magnifying glasses, focussing and intensifying the ongoing relationship work, and forcing family members to take stock and signpost the state of their social bond, and as cultural reference points, providing a window into normative expectations of how parents and adult children should perform relatedness.

To demonstrate how generational as well as gendered identities impacted on researcher-researched relationships built during the interview process, engendering specific insights about contemporary British grandfathering.

An ‘ad-hoc’ reflection of interview transcripts and researcher field notes generated from 31 qualitative interviews with men who are grandfathers, to reflexively interrogate how various identity markers operated within my encounters with them, as a young female researcher.

Men positioned me within a grandparent-grandchild relationship during the interviews, which afforded specific insights into contemporary grandfatherhood, including the socio-historical context in which grandfathering takes place. Whilst perceptions and assumptions about gender influence how participants perceive researchers, focusing too rigidly on gender is problematic. It risks re-enforcing potentially stereotypical assumptions about men and women, thus downplaying the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in men’s constructions and performances of their diverse later life identities, as well as obscuring the complex intersectionalities and power relations that operate in the field.

To argue that the concept of ‘betweenness’ aids in developing a more robust understanding of the complex and knowable negotiations of similarity and difference within research encounters.

Increasing numbers of grandparents are raising their grandchildren because of problems within the parental generation such as drug and alcohol addiction, AIDS, divorce, and unemployment. Yet little is known about how grandparents who “parent” or “co‐parent” then‐grandchildren differ from other grandparents, or the extent to which parenting or co‐parenting grandchildren affects grandparent's psychological, physical, or financial well‐being, or feelings of family solidarity. The purpose of this research is to: (1) compare the characteristics of grandparents who go on to parent or co‐parent their grandchildren to grandparents who do not, and (2) assess the effects of entering the two caregiving arrangements — parenting and co‐parenting — on changes in grandparent's psychological, physical, and financial well‐being, as well as their feelings of family solidarity. The data for this study came from 659 grandparents from the USC Longitudinal Study of Generations (LSG) who participated in at least two consecutive waves of data collection measured at three year intervals between 1985 to 1994: parenting grandparents (N = 12), co‐parenting grandparents (N = 27), and non‐parenting grandparents (N = 620). Analysis of the quantitative data reveals that grandparents who parent or co‐parent their grandchildren tend to be younger and less healthy than non‐parenting grandparents. Contrary to expectation, the data also indicate that there is no statistically significant decline in psychological, physical, or financial well‐being, nor in normative or marital solidarity after grandparents begin to caregive. Although the majority of grandparents show stability or improvement in overall psychological well‐being, some show decline. The qualitative data suggests that the extent to which grandparents can choose their level of involvement in caregiving influences and the age of the grandchild, whether they experience caregiving as positive or negative.