In the last chapter we explored the degree to which societal change since 1960 has affected the connectedness of kin networks. We found that, in spite of the increased heterogeneity of extended family networks, in terms of both residence and occupation, most of our respondents still lived close to other members of their extended family and had regular contact with them. Looking at their patterns of residence and contact more carefully revealed some differences, with both ‘Welsh’ and working-class respondents being likely to live closer to their parents and to see them more frequently than their ‘non-Welsh’ and middle-class counterparts. For Rosser and Harris investigating family practices in Swansea in 1960, cultural identity had these two salient dimensions of class and Welshness, and cultural differentiation, along with occupational and geographical differentiation, was associated with decreasing solidarity within families. The cultural diversity of Swansea in 2002 is considerably more complex and the potential for increased cultural heterogeneity correspondingly greater. In this chapter we consider how different ways of ‘doing’ family symbolise different cultural identities and whether families continue to provide a sense of identity for their members. Families and identities, both personal and collective, are interrelated in a complex fashion. Thus, family forms and family relationships, particularly the influence of parents on children, shape the personal identities of their members while broader collective identities – such as those based on ethnicity and class – affect the ways in which families are organised. This chapter explores these relationships between families and cultural identities and how they have changed over the past 40 years. First, however, we discuss the way class and cultural identities relate to our four ethnographic areas and the different patterns of family formation which characterise them.

Place and cultural identity

Rosser and Harris noted that the distinctive neighbourhoods with strong local identities that they found in Swansea were frequently used by their respondents as symbols of class distinctions, with those in the west of Swansea being associated with ‘social superiority’ and those in the east with a lower social class; they felt that their respondents’ tendency to speak of class using a simple twofold division into middle and working class was ‘reinforced by the basic geographical dichotomy of Swansea into east and west in the popular image of the town’ (1965, 86).