Social contacts between middle-aged women and those in the younger and older generations help define the social networks that hold the generations together. Through the interpersonal ties constituting these networks, friends, as well as families, exchange various kinds of support that affect an individual's social, psychic, physical, emotional, and economic status. This article sets up a theoretical framework for studying women's social contacts with family and friends and tests it using data from the 1981 wave of the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women. Our results indicate that the contacts that middle-aged women have with kith and kin depend on the nature of the relationship, household structure, distance, resources, and a predisposition to contact with family. But the effects of the most important of these depend on other characteristics in key ways.
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Waite et al. (1992) studied this question.