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Every individual is connected to a network of kin --- her/his family in the broad sense of that term --- that develops and changes as that individual ages. Family networks affect demographic, economic, and health-related aspects of life and society. Because of its importance, kinship dynamics deserves a formal theory that can link it to mortality, fertility, and other demographic variables. This document reviews the literature and outlines a research program leading to a comprehensive mathematical model for kinship. It was prepared as a proposal that was submitted to, and funded by, the European Research Council Advanced Grant program. The kinship model provides deterministic and stochastic properties of kin, accounts for both dead and living kin, applies to age-, stage-, or multistate models, and incorporates time variation and sex-specific demographic rates. When applied to cohorts, it yields the means and variances of the lifetime experience of kin of any specified type. The model provides the sources of the variance in kinship structures and provides a conceptual and operational link to population projections.
Hal Caswell (Thu,) studied this question.