The document examines appropriate units for studying changes in familial relations and rural-urban ties, including the importance of the increasing interdependence of rural and urban contexts in family interaction. There have been two broadly contrasting approaches to the problems of urbanization and family change in Africa: (1) "one-way" model which postulates a generally progressive, undirectional Westernization and nuclearization of families as urban migration, industrialization, and other modernizing influences increase; (2) "alternation" model which concentrates on the interplay of tribe and town within a variety of urban settings. These two approaches often work at cross purposes, or explain different sets of data, even though both share a common set of analytical data. Since these models use the urban social system as an explanatory variable, it is then essential to show that such "urban" factors are not also found to some degree among similar rural residents of the area from which men have migrated. The paper also examines some of the processes which generate household form among urban and rural samples of men and their families in Kenya. The major process of social change which influenced the study design is defined as the interaction by urban migrants in rural-urban networks of kin. An Abaluyia subtribe in Western Kenya, 230 miles from Nairobi, was chosen as a rural base. This area (Kisa) has a high proportion (55 percent) of its adult males working away in urban areas throughout East Africa, mostly Nairobi. As yet incomplete, these data evaluate whether or not the network is an arbitrary research creation. (KM)