Although the literature on social capital, social support and social networks uses the concept of emotional support, studies rarely recognise nuances of the emotional relationships in late life. Using a personal communities framework, we examine the subjective meaning of family and friendship ties that form the network of emotionally close relationships of a cohort of Chilean people between 60 and 74 years of age. Chile is an interesting case to investigate personal communities, as the country is facing both a rapid process of population ageing and the consequences of abrupt socio-cultural changes triggered by a military government. We conducted qualitative semi-structured interviews using personal communities diagrams that enabled study participants to reflect on what and how different types of personal ties were important to them. Data analysis included thematic analysis of interview transcripts and classification of identified personal communities using Pahl and Spencer's typology. The personal communities framework proved useful in capturing the composition of older people's networks of close relationships and in reflecting the diverse ways different ties are relevant in late life. We further developed a complementary typology based on the distinction between ‘clustered’ and ‘hierarchical’ personal communities. This complementary typology adds a cultural dimension to understand better emotional closeness in late life in a context of rapid socio-cultural changes affecting levels of social trust.

A recurrent finding in personal network research is that individual and social outcomes are influenced not just by the kind of people one knows, but also by how those people are connected to each other. Personal network structure – the way in which one’s personal contacts know and interact with each other – reflects broader trends in social organization and personal communities, and shapes patterns of social capital, support, and isolation. This article proposes a method to identify typologies of structure in large collections of personal networks. The method is applied to six datasets collected in widely different circumstances and using various survey instruments. It is then compared with another recently introduced method to extract typologies of egocentric network structure. Findings show that personal network structure can be effectively summarized using just three measures of cohesive subgroup characteristics. Structural typologies can then be identified by applying standard cluster analysis techniques to the three variables. Both methods considered in the article capture significant variation in network structures, but they also show substantial levels of disagreement and cross-classification. I discuss similarities and differences between the methods, and potential applications of the proposed typologies to substantive research on personal communities, social support, and social capital.

The social networks of older people are a significant influence on their health and wellbeing. Adult children are an important element in their parent's network and provide the majority of informal care. The morphology of personal networks alters with age, employment, gender and relationships. Not having children automatically reduces both vertical familial structure and affects the wider formal and informal social links that children can bring. Childless men are missing from gerontological, reproduction, sociological and psychological research. These fields have all mainly focused on family and women. This paper reports on an auto/biographical qualitative study framed by biographical, feminist, gerontological and lifecourse approaches. Data were gathered from semi-structured biographical interviews with 14 self-defined involuntarily childless men aged between 49 and 82 years old. A latent thematic analysis highlighted the complex intersections between childlessness and individual agency, relationships and socio-cultural structures. The impact of major lifecourse events and non-events had significant implications for how childless people perform and view their social and self-identity. I argue that involuntary childlessness affects the social, emotional and relational aspects of men's lived experience across the lifecourse.