How architectural principles can help conceptualize and analyze breakups among intergenerational households

Guided by two architectural design principles, we investigated whether differences in the ways intergenerational households were structured could predict the odds of intergenerational households breaking apart. The two architectural design principles guiding our study were: (a) to classify structures, such as intergenerational households, according to a hierarchical ordering, in our case, a generational hierarchy, first, second, third, and so forth); and (b) to identify a central entity or focal point responsible for maintaining the structure, again for us, the focal generation responsible for a household. Applying both principles to a rich source of data that contained a large sample of intergenerational households, we found striking differences in odds of breakups by generational ordering, focal generation, and race. Whereas white three-generation households headed by grandparents were the most likely to break up, black skipped-generation households headed by grandparents were the least likely to break up.