Article written by 2007 DPDF The Political Economy of Redistribution Fellow Christopher S. Marcum and Laura M. Koehly, featured in Advances in Life Course Research, Volume 24:

Pathways for resource – or other – exchanges within families have long been known to be dependent on the structure of relations between generations (0280, 0105, 0005 and 0325). Much life course research has theorized models of inter-generational exchange – including, the ‘sandwich generation’ (Miller, 1981) and the ‘skipped generation’ pathways (Chalfie, 1994) – but there is little work relating these theories to relevant network mechanisms such as liaison brokerage (Gould & Fernandez, 1989) and other triadic configurations (0065 and 0350). To address this, a survey of models of resource allocation between members of inter-generational households from a network perspective is introduced in this paper. Exemplary data come from health discussion networks among Mexican-origin multi-generational households.