Original articles
Does paternal uncertainty explain discriminative grandparental solicitude? A cross-cultural study in Greece and Germany

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Abstract

Recent research on kin investment as a reproductive strategy is based on the idea that differences in grandparental caregiving directly reflect degrees of differential grandpaternal versus grandmaternal certainty. In a cross-cultural study in Greece and Germany, 544 subjects (318 Greeks, 208 Germans, 18 of other origins) were asked for an assessment of their grandparents' (GPs') caregiving. In Germany and urban Greece (modern Western societies), the maternal GPs were rated as more intensive caregivers than the paternal GPs, but this was not the case in rural Greece, where paternal GPs provided more care. However, in all groups, grandmothers were more caring than grandfathers. Thus, contrary to previous theory and research, these two effects must be clearly distinguished, and may be explained by (1) more intense female caregiving in humans (as in other viviparous mammals) and (2) a socially engendered favoring of maternal relatives in Western industrial societies as opposed to the favoring of paternal GPs seen in the patrilateral culture of rural Greece.

Section snippets

Overview of the comparative study

Neither Smith (1988) nor other authors have clearly shown that the differences in grandparental caregiving behavior result from differences in paternal uncertainty. Only the correspondence between the grandparental rank order and the model of grandparental certainty provides evidence for the p.c. hypothesis. Furthermore, the proximate basis of kin recognition remains unclear. Thus, the present comparative study of Greece and Germany was undertaken to assess whether the rank order of

Samples and data collection

German- and Greek-language questionnaires from a total of 544 subjects (208 Germans, 318 Greeks, 18 other nationalities) were analyzed. Subjects were recruited opportunistically. German respondents were 63.9% female and 35.1% male; 1.0% left gender unspecified. Greek respondents were 47.5% female and 51.9% male (0.6% unspecified). Students constituted 67.3% of the Germans and just 8.2% of the Greeks, but because there were no significant differences in responses to the questions about GPs

Differing number of GPs

Before presenting the results on discriminative grandparental solicitude, possible effects of the number of living GPs during the respondent's childhood need to be considered. In the present study, no effect of the number of GPs on the average GP rating could be detected (Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA): K-W-χ2 = 4.98, df = 3, p >.17, N = 516). Separate analyses of Greek and German samples also did not yield significant results. Moreover, because the following analyses are

Final discussion

The present study replicates the results of Euler and Weitzel (1996) for Germans and demonstrates that confounding variables cannot explain the differential GP caregiving phenomenon. The results for the Greek sample support the assumption that the grandchild's GP rating represents actual grandparental solicitude: In rural Greece, the higher GP rating of males compared to females is obviously a result of a preference for (grand)sons.

Nevertheless, there are new results showing that the theory

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Harald Euler and Martin Daly for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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