Acknowledgements

For fruitful discussion of the subject, I wish to thank: my parents, my fellow Msc.-students, the members of EBSG, Marc Mehu, dr. Craig Roberts, Prof. dr. Mark Nelissen, Prof. dr. Robin Dunbar and especially dr. Susanne Shultz and dr. John Lycett . For discussion of the statistical analyses and techniques I would like to thank Toon Kuppens, dr. Craig Roberts and dr. Susanne Shultz.

The Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) kindly gave me access to the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (NKPS) dataset. Furthermore, I wish to thank the users of the NKPS e-forum, especially Ruben van Galen, for promptly responding to my questions concerning the dataset.

I would like to thank the Lazard foundation, as well as my parents of course, for financial support throughout this academic year. Also, my family, friends and course-fellows for social support throughout this thesis period.

‘The Netherlands Kinship Panel Study is funded by grant 480-10-009 from the Major Investments Fund of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and by the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI), Utrecht University, the University of Amsterdam and Tilburg University’