Ethnicity and Extended Familism in an Upper-Middle-Class Suburb

Previous research has shown that, in an upper-middle-class suburb in a North Central state, Jewish families report more extended familism than do Christian families. The present paper shows more clearly the association between ethnicity and familism by using three further indices of extended familism and by dividing the Christian respondents into Catholics and Protestants. The three new indices-extensity of kin households present in the metropolitan area, intensity of such presence, and interaction with those households-are more significantly associated with ethnicity than was the index used in the previous research-functionality of interaction with households of kin. Generally, the Protestants are the least familistic of the three ethnic categories. It was hypothesized that occupation and migration are variables that intervene between ethnicity and extended familism; the data, however, rule otherwise. It is tentatively cancluded, rather, that extended familism intervenes between ethnicity and migration.