This article posits that nuclear, independent families are more common under certain economic conditions that affect food supply, demand for family labor, physical mobility, and property system. Empirical analysis suggests that nuclear, independent families are associated with hunting and gathering subsistence type and low social stratification.

Through review of the economic literature and cross-cultural analysis of families (nuclear, stem, and complex), the authors show that family type is heterogeneous and argue that types other than nuclear have been largely ignored by economists. They encourage, based on their findings, further research on family structure and the development of better models for household decision making. They use ancestral populations in the ethnographic record to estimate country-level family patterns.

This book investigates the origins of supernatural and religious beliefs. The author tests associations between various types of beliefs (e.g. witchcraft, monotheism) and various societal characteristics (e.g. mobility, class stratification). Many hypotheses are supported. Theoretical discussion is included, and the author posits that “the belief in a particular kind of spirit springs from experiences with a type of persisting sovereign group whose area of jurisdiction corresponds to that attributed to the spirit” (175).

The expressed purpose of the present publication is to provide a typology of institutionalized dissociational states on a world-wide basis, using biological, situational, and cultural parameters. The study is comprised of field work, literature review, ethnographic research, and cross-cultural statistical analysis. The researchers use these findings to aid in the construction of cross-cultural theory, and to provide a platform for further work on dissociational states to continue.

This study explores the evolution of family systems in non-industrial agricultural societies based on environmental conditions. First, the authors conduct a multi-evolutionary simulation for each family system: absolute nuclear families (nuclear with unequal inheritance), egalitarian nuclear families (nuclear with equal inheritance), stem families (extended families with unequal inheritance), and community families (extended families with equal inheritance). Second, they use Spearman's rank correlation analyses to assess the relation between the 186 non-industrial societies and the types of inheritance relationships, either parent-child (nuclear or extended) or inter-sibling (strongly biased or equal). The results show that the four core family systems are related to wealth and land resources. Other relevant findings are that low polygyny is related to agricultural societies, higher poverty levels to extended families, and accelerated wealth accumulation to strongly biased inheritance.

This study examines relationships among the instruction of children, household type and size, and political integration. Particular attention is paid to type of instruction--whether the instructor is kin or non-kin, and whether the instruction requires a change in the child's residence. Different types of instruction are theorized to solve problems for children in different household types (e.g. children in mother-child households experience gender identity conflict, and so leave their houses for instruction from non-kin). The causality between instruction and societal complexity is also discussed.

This study uses a multiple regression analysis to examine the relationship between society type and several variables of societal organization. Results suggest that limited family type is more likely to be found in complex societies.

The second and third parts of this book classify the economic systems of foraging and agricultural societies in the SCCS based on correlations between their institutions of property an distribution. These economic types are then examined for relationships with other social, political, demographic, and environmental factors in order to draw tentative conclusions regarding the origins of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. The fourth part of the book uses cross-national data to examine similar associations in industrial/service economies, and is not included here.

This study examines several correlates of the shape of floor plans of dwellings. Authors find that "whether a culture is settled or nomadic, the form of its family and the presence or absence of status distinctions are related to its house type, and the house types can in turn be inferred from the floor plan." Curvilinear houses are associated with polygyny and nomadism and rectilinear houses are associated with sedentarism, extended families, and status distinctions.

Using Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian phylogenetic comparative methods, this study aims to answer how cultural meanings and linguistic forms develop in kinship terminology focusing on sibling terminology. It tests sequential models of change of sibling terminologies among the Austronesian language family to reconstruct: the historical state and evolutionary change of relative age and relative sex; whether these distinctions have independent or dependent evolutionary trajectories; and whether opposite-sex distinctions might have developed when no such distinction previously existed. The results suggest that the trajectories are independent and that there was an initial absence of relative sex distinction. Other findings are that the transitions from absence to complex elaborated terminologies and the disruption of elaborate distinctions are very unusual.