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The Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (NKPS) involves the development of a database that allows the examination of family and kinship in the Netherlands from a dynamic multi-actor perspective. The NKPS is motivated by both societal and scientific considerations. The increasingly complex nature of contemporary family relationships has posed society and policymakers with a series of new and challenging questions, but the lack of institutional and scientific growth in family studies has left this potential unrealized. The scarcity of high-quality databases has affected the competitiveness of Dutch family studies in the international academic community. The NKPS offers a large-scale, multi-actor, multi-method panel survey that is accessible to the national and international research community. This study has been explicitly undertaken to provide a data resource for a wide range of researchers.

The first central component of the NKPS is the emphasis on the nature and degree of solidarity within family relationships. Solidarity is defined as ‘feelings of mutual connectedness in family relationships and how these are expressed in behavioral terms’. Three dimensions are distinguished: instrumental, social and emotional solidarity. The second central component is the focus on family relationships in a broad sense, instead of just relationships within the nuclear family. The research goals are (a) to describe the nature and strength of solidarity in family and kin relationships, (b) to explain variations in solidarity across individuals, social categories, and time, and (c) to examine the consequences of solidarity for individual well-being, family functioning and the relationship between families and other social institutions.