The research reported in this book was inspired by Rosser and Harris's study of the family in Swansea which was conducted in 1960 and published in 1965 as The family and social change. It takes the form of a restudy. Rosser and Harris's research was also a restudy insofar as it replicated the methods of Michael Young and Peter Willmott's famous research on Bethnal Green, in the East End of London. Young and Willmott's research, which was carried out in the 1950s, was published in 1957 as The family in East London and, as Rosser and Harris's 1965 foreword noted, ‘challenged accepted views about the family in urban society’.

Young and Willmott claimed that in Bethnal Green the family had not shrunk to its nuclear core and had not become isolated from wider kin as a result of urbanisation and industrialisation. On the contrary, there were high rates of interaction and exchanges of domestic services between separate households, central to which were the relationships between mothers and their married daughters, these extended families being more widely connected though a dense network of kinship ties. It was obviously important to explore whether these findings were peculiar to Bethnal Green. The 1960 study, therefore, sought to discover whether or not Young and Willmott's findings about the resilience of the extended family would be replicated in Swansea. Swansea was much larger than Bethnal Green in both area and population, with a much lower population density and a different occupational structure and cultural composition. In spite of these differences, the findings of the Swansea study were very similar to those for Bethnal Green and led its authors to ask whether ‘we have a regularity of behaviour which is a common feature of urban kinship in Britain’.

British sociologists, however, have never answered that question with an unambiguous affirmative. And far from regarding findings from Swansea as confirming those of the East End of London, their Welshness seems to have had the effect of making them seem, by definition, exceptional and, therefore, unsuitable for this task. We trust that the research reported in this book will fare better. Today Wales is no longer, for most of those resident to the east of Offa's Dyke, ‘a faraway country of which we know little’.