This book is a comprehensive analysis of many aspects of social structure including family, clan, community, kinship terminology, social organization, regulation of sex, incest taboos, and sexual choice.

This paper examines diverging devolution—the transmission of property to both males and females—and its predictors and consequences. Particular attention is paid to kinship terminology and control of women’s marriage. Multiple hypotheses are supported.

This study examines Crow and Omaha kinship terminologies, cross-cousin marriage practices, and descent rules. Several hypotheses relating these three variables are tested.

This paper tests some of Levi-Strauss's pronouncements on Crow-Omaha kinship systems cross-culturally. The author tests the relationships between Crow-Omaha and Hawaiian kinship systems and cross-cousin marriage. Results suggest that both kinship systems will prohibit cross-cousin marriage.

Researchers examined kinships terminology systems for explanations regarding specifically observed typology of kin terms for cousins cross-culturally. They explore two theories, the first relating to population size via bottleneck evolution, and the second relating to social practices that shape kinship systems. Using the Ethnographic Atlas within D-PLACE, 936 societies with kinship system information were studied. The findings did not suggest a relationship between increased community size and a decrease in kinship complexity, however the research does suggest a relationship between practices of marriage and descent and kinship complexity.

This study investigates the relationship between Crow kinship terminology and avunculocality. Results indicate that if matrilateral cross-cousin marriage is associated with Crow kinship systems, then societies that are avunculocal are more likely have Crow systems.

This paper examines the behavior between close kin and affines of the opposite sex. The authors "point to certain differences between continental areas that are related to specific social factors, including the structure of descent groups and the nature of marriage arrangements."

After noticing that there are no cross-cultural phylogenetic studies of grandparent terminologies, the authors use the record from 134 Pama-Nyungan languages to explore the evolution of this kinship category and to evaluate the effects of social structures in this evolution. The authors suggest that there used to be four different terms for grandparents in the proto-Pama-Nyungan language family, which was supported by the data. The results show no evidence of co-evolution between these grandparent systems with neither community marriage organization nor post-marital residence. There is not a significant correlation between grandparent and cross-cousin terms; however, there is some evidence that grand-child terms are correlated to grandparent systems.

Kinbank is a global database of 210,903 kinship terms derived from 1,229 spoken and signed languages. The authors created Kinbank as a tool to help explain recurring patterns across cultures through kinship terminology. They illustrate its usefulness by addressing two questions as an example: 1) Is there gender bias in the phonological structure of parent terms? and 2) Did bifurcate-merging terminology and cross-cousin marriage co-evolve in Bantu languages? Using a Bayesian phylogenetic approach, the authors find support for the first question, but none for the latter.

This study examines previous hypotheses concerning kinship terminologies, particularly the development of bifurcate merging. The roles of moieties, exogamy, unilinear kin groupings, unilinear descent, and preferential mating are considered.